Setting up a staging server?

[richardf]

I have been playing with phpwcms for a few days now, and am starting to get a feel for how it works. One thing I was expecting to stumble across was some kind of preview-before-publish facility (a.k.a "staging server" on big CMS systems).

The general idea is that you have somewhere to initally view your changes (maybe including some formal testing across the updated site) before making it live. I appreciate that phpwcms is intended to be lightweight (a Good Thing) but find the apparent lack of a preview facility a bit of a problem (the Preview button seems to publish immediately to the live site, unless I have missed something).

I intend to try setting up two phpwcms sites, with on-demand (not scheduled) one-way sychronization of both the database and the uploaded files from one to the other, in an attempt to setup a basic staging server.

The questions are:

- has anyone tried this before (if so, with what success?)
- are there any known better approaches to providing this kind of functionality?
- is it there already, and I just missed it?

Richard

[oeconom]

Hi richardf,
when creating an article and not marking it 'visible', it is only visible to you as long as you are logged into the backend.

Best wishes,
Felix

[richardf]

I have had a play with this, but cannot see how it gets around the core problem. For new articles, fine (blog style), but for modifications to existing articles (website maintenance) it does not help, as I would have to copy the existing article to a new one to be edited, which would break internal document links.

It also does not help me with making changes to the structure of the website, or changes to the design.

In general I tend to work with at least two browsers running to check the results of changes, so cannot use being logged in as a way of filtering the changed but not yet published material.

With a fairly well shaken out design I think that content updates will be safe enough, if editors know they need to check their work immediately after publication, and even if something does go wrong it will be corrected fairly quickly (thinking of non-profit sites at the moment).

I like phpwcms (have worked with commercial CMS that are nothing like as nice to work with), just would like to be able to use the staging server model with it. At the moment it looks like I need to experiment with:

- methods for synchronizing between mySQL databases
- methods for synchronizing the configuration files (probably using Subversion)

to include needing to synchronize content back from the live site to the development/staging sites (I have found it interesting how different content affects your view of the site design).

[oeconom]

Hi richardf,

you're right, I didn't think about editing articles.
Bute my answer is still correct for adding content parts to an article, what will usually be more likely than editing content parts.

Never the less, I don't know if Doliver Georgi eventually is thinking of (or even already developing) a kind of staging or release/approval workflow for new or changed articles and/or content parts.

Best wishes,
FELIX