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Just wondering if people have any thoughts around the best way to setup Wordpress 3 to use for development, staging and production.
I currently have an install that I just use for dev, before moving the files to stage for a friend to review. This normally goes back and forwards for a while until they are happy. Then it goes to prod.
It's a fairly manual process, so open to any suggestions as to how to best automate parts of this.
What works for you?
I think you know this one : http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/12865
Someone posting here is I believe involved in google: wpengine.com (i can only post 1 link) who offers one-click staging
Ok i've found a couple of solutions if anyone is looking. They aren't perfect but they are doing the job.
For the main development period before go-live I use Deploymint (http://markmaunder.com/2011/08/19/deploymint-a-staging-and-deployment-system-for-wordpress/). This is based on Git and is great for your moves between Dev, Stage and Production. However, the problem with it is that when you take your snapshot of Prod to bring back to Dev, if Prod keeps changing (ie. new posts, edits, comments etc.), there is no capability to merge (yet?) and so that will be lost.
I've been using this for major changes (Design etc.) and it has worked fine. To get around the issue of merges, I just look at the changeset to find which files I need to update.
The second part of the equation is Crowd Favorite Ramp (http://crowdfavorite.com/wordpress/ramp/). Ramp is good for using stage to make changes to content before pushing them to prod. Great for the content guys and helps to prevent embarrassing changes to Prod!
What platform? I use Linux to stage WP3.0 and it was a bit of a challenge to set up (I can't login with a subdomain install unless I disable SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL constant then reenable after login.
You can set up the subdomains to work in /etc/hosts but I have a few DB queries I have to run each time I download my production DB, so that it will work locally.
