John Mee – Some programmer in Sydney

I use a testing server for my site, and I use wordpress. I create and update content on testing, then deploy it to production. But the wordpress import procedure won’t update an existing post so…

How do I deploy my wordpress content from Testing to Production?

I like to mirror and build my wordpress site on a testing server and get it all ‘just right’ then push the changes to production when I’m somewhat ready to release. This a standard practice in the IT industry and gives us the advantages of

• the site is never in a half-baked or broken state
• development is super responsive since the server is on our local network
• the site statistics don’t get polluted by the traffic of development
• we can try new things without worrying that we’ve broken the website
• we have a backup which is active and recent

But, because wordpress is not built with any anticipation of this concept, some problems arise

• How to pull fresh comments and posts from production to testing?
• How to push new and updated posts from testing to production?
• How to handle images and media attached to posts?
• How to handle site configuration options?
• How to handle Theme changes?

Today we’ll tackle the easiest of these problems…

How to pull wordpress comments and posts from production to testing?