Staging environments for CMS content changes

[Spike B]

Hi all,

We are running into an issue were changes made in the CMS go live
immediately and make the site too volatile for production use. I'm
wondering if P'unk Ave or anyone else has set up a staging environment
for content changes to made, to be pushed to production when
everything is A-ok.

It shouldn't be that hard -- here's what we plan to do:

Have an exact copy of the codebase running on a staging machine, and
when all the CMS content changes are approved and looking good, we
would provide a one-click solution to Marketing where the entire
database is dumped into a SQL file, and all the uploads are tar'd up,
sent to the production server, and untar'd, and the SQL is imported
into production database.

An added benefit of this approach is that on each push, we can save
the tarball and SQL files in a versioned directory, proving us a
snapshot of each release in case we have to roll back.

Any thoughts, or other approaches?

Thanks
Spike B

[Tom Boutell]

Hi Spike,

You should really look at sfSyncContentPlugin. We never do a job
without it anymore. It syncs not just the database but also any data
directories, such as web/uploads and data/pk_writable, that you choose
to designate. It's a mystery to me why more people aren't using it.
You can sync content in either direction, so it's great for pulling
the latest production data down to staging and dev boxes for accurate
testing of things like schema migrations.

Speaking of schema migrations, you also may want a more robust task
for deploying code. Check out pkToolkit:deploy for a more thorough
version of Symfony's built-in project:deploy task. It runs
doctrine:migrate, cc and project:permissions after syncing the code.

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Tom Boutell
P'unk Avenue
215 755 1330
punkave.com
window.punkave.com

[Spike B]

Ah yes I remember hearing about that plugin. Will look into it.
Thanks!

> > For more options, visit this group athttp://groups.google.com/group/pkcontextcms?hl=en.