If you are developing a wordpress theme, it is one of the benefits of developing locally because is that you do not have to use the content that will be on the live site currently using. If you are developing a theme on wordpress and you have to plan that it release to the population at large and for many many users, then you should use a content filler to make sure you style the vast spectrum of your theme content. Let’s suppose you can use the WordPress sample content that is available at wordpress site and site address ttp://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Unit_Test you can see here content. There are many alternative sample content import files such as http://wpcandy.com/made/the-sample-post-collection this one provided by WPCandy, Remember that WordPress Theme reviewers will use theirs to approve your theme to be in the container.
The entire Theme Repository checklist can review at http://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development_Checklis t this is the address, when you are developing a theme in wordpress and you want to test it with the sample content mentioned in the previous paragraph, and you also need to target specific content for the actual site you are developing the theme for which is currently running. Then use for WordPress Multisite. So, WordPress Multisite allows you to you can run or leverage the same themes and plugins for multiple WordPress sites that are in the WordPress network running. So we set this up so that one of our WordPress sites has the sample content of site. Then we created a second site for the site-specific content and then you give this a try for enable the sits, then you will network-enable the theme that you are developing and activate it on both sites at the same time many wordpress Web Design Agency Cape town are using this technique. This allows or permits you to after edit one set of theme files you can jump back and forth in your browser to two different WordPress content sets.
If you are developing a new plugin for wordpress, first test it in WordPress Multisite to make sure it works properly and you can also set up many virtual hosts on your machine running different versions of WordPress CMS, a few revisions back and also development releases to make sure and confirm your plugin will continue to work with the next update and not do any mistake. And we all preach to users to keep WordPress current vesion, the reality is that some sites lag behind, either because of hosting ignorance, laziness or restrictions. The important thing it to make sure your plugin continues to working properly if you want people to use it and as thay are using previous. Your new project working locally in wordpress, and you also have removed all the errors and notices from WordPress and PHP that are shown, now you are ready to push it to a live server and you common user is ready to use it. In the next article, you will look at some of the challenges and tactics for pushing code live.
Deploying Local Changes on Production end of WordPress
First, differentiate between the different types of objects you are deploying in the live server. There is a code and which could be theme and theme assets or plugin code. Other is content, which is the website subject matter from the pages and posts and is stored in the database or any plugin data it may be images or news, etc. The most important thing is that the configuration which is also stored in the database.
Inserting or deploying the code is easy. This is very easy for Developers. Another advantages of PHP and WordPress is that you can generally drop code into the document root and it runs at the next request. Move or Deploying code is very simple and you can use your FTP client to do for it every well organized like Web Designer London follow this pattern. Remember try to use SFTP, as possible, because it is a secure protocol but FTP is not.
In wordpress deploying the content and the configuration is more difficult and little complex but don’t to be worry. The WordPress uses fully qualified links in all the content, that’s why every internal menu item and HREF has the full domain name embedded with it. And the configuration of the site is also tied to the domain name that WordPress was installed at your local machine. So, You can’t simply take a database dump without internal information like post, pages each and everything which stored in database.
So there is an intermediary step to change the domain names in the database tables export before importing it into the production site database. Remember here that you are not going to any updated content on the live site with your content from the development site. It dependent on your exact needs How exactly you do this in your situation, however this process is very similar to a situation in which you are moving your site or code from one domain to another domain. This process is very common and easily you can find it tutorial step by step and documented in various websites about it, the WordPress codex at http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress is trying to give every information in detail and guide in perfect way, and many other tutorials. So this is how the process works for us, let’s suppose that you want to move all content from your development database to live site or another domain. It means you are going to remove all the fully qualified and maintained links from the content on your development site.
So all the next content you add to the production site if any cahgne or update in it, only once the content is moved from the development site to production site, here is a method to make all the URLs root relative and then they will work on both you’re and the live site and development site. wp-DBManager plugin by Lester Chan is the best solution of this process you use it. It allows or permits you to perform SQL queries on the data and make database backups. Other way is that you could also use WordPress’s built-in database export functionality and PHPMyAdmin to do the same work. Pretend you are moving from the local development site webdesignagency.local to the live production site of perform SQL queries on the data.co.za. So Using the plugin, make a backup of your working test site or local site. Other, in the SQL page of the plugin and you will run the queries shown in below Figure, for update the URLs in your site’s content or your data. Basically, we are removing the domain name from the URLs in the HTML code and link has been created.
Then export your content from your development site or local machine. This option Content export is found in your WordPress dashboard under Tools it is left hand side of dash board under the ‘Tools’ option click on Export. Then download this file and now this is your movable content with root. Then import this content into your live site or live domain. Import functionality is found in your WordPress Dashboard under Tools and then click on ‘Import’. Here should be cautious because that you do not overwrite newer content or content you want to keep in the live database. So It is not a very difficult process, It require only planning and management of work and many Web Design Company Cape Town and Johannesburg are following the strategy of good planning and well management so they are delivering very good and reasonable products in the market. When using WordPress as a Content Management System there is a challenge, users have to access to log in to the production site and make changes easily — so this is the point. So, your development content gets out of synchronize WordPress databases between live, development and be able to handle conflict resolution and staging.
