In this situation, I’d recommend the following: Dump your production database into your test database Install WP 3 and point it at your test DB Run the database upgrade Turn users loose on the test instance We used a similar process on a much larger installation, and it worked fairly well. Having the second instance … Read more
There is no settled solution for change management in a WordPress environment. I recently wrote about one approach, that might be helpful. @scribu then brought our attention to this new ‘Ramp’ offering for content staging. which might be of interest, depending on your use case. @MikeSchinkel has his own potential solution which doesn’t attempt to … Read more
@Blockhead, You also might want to check out DeployMint which only works on WordPress Multisite – but could be the best solution for what you are looking for. http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/19/deploymint-a-staging-and-deployment-system-for-wordpress/
If you are using Pantheon for hosting it turns out to be trivial to do this as a test (they call it dev), stage (they call it test) and production server are built into their platform along with tools to manage moving data and files around. Plus with Pantheon you get easy but optional Git … Read more
You might be interested in this Q/A in the FAQ category: How to: Easily Move a WordPress Install from Development to Production? Server mirroring/migration is a pain because there are so many pieces that might (or might not) need to be synced. PHP code (core, plugins, themes) is easy enough to keep straight. But when … Read more
First off, you need to set your global WP settings under the “WordPress” heading in config/deploy.rb: set :wp_user, “aaronthomas” # The admin username set :wp_email, “[email protected]” # The admin email address set :wp_sitename, “WP Deploy” # The site title set :wp_localurl, “localhost” # Your local environment URL These are the settings used for your inital … Read more
You can achieve what you want using Local + WPEngine. Recently WPEngine made a deeper integration with Local. Local works great with windows and is very easy to set up a new WordPress local environment with it (only with a few clicks you will have a new WordPress site installed in your local enviroment, with … Read more
Note: This is more a comment than an answer, but I wanted to format it nicely. I don’t know about recording, but I imagine something like the following in SQL could work. INSERT INTO DB1.Tbl1 ( id, x, y ) SELECT DB2.Tbl1.id, DB2.Tbl1.x, DB2.Tbl1.y FROM DB2.Tbl1 ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE x=x, y=y; Beware, this is … Read more
The problem seems to be you not deciding what is the “staging” server for. If it is for content staging/creation than it is actually a production server from software development POV. Anything that assumes that the software is functioning well and results in something being actually published is part of the production system. You need … Read more
Newer hosting providers that cater specifically to WordPress usually have tools in place to ease this pain. I put my clients on Pantheon which has this neat Git-enabled workflow, where code only moves up (from dev to staging to production) and DB stuff only moves down (vice versa from the code). Copying a database from … Read more