Maintaining Wordpress Sites

Here's the process that has been used for deploying Wordpress theme changes for BIG IDeA. This process can be changed to suit the needs of the site you're working with. For example, BIG IDeA does not rely much on automation because a lot of work happens on the production side and automation may accidentally overwrite those changes. However, a different Wordpress site that has more predictable process / control may benefit from automation (i.e. automatic deployment from github to production).

In BIG IDeA, the dev site doesn't deploy directly to production. The dev site is only for testing in a production environment since local and remote WP configurations can be different.

Here's the typical BIG IDeA theme update process:

1. Changes deployed to dev site and tested.

2. On production site, put up a maintenance lock (Coming Soon Page & Maintenance Mode plugin by SeedProd).

3. On production site, download copy of the theme currently in production.

4. Consolidate any changes done in production by comparing production theme with new theme to upload (manual process using diff / Kdiff).

5. Delete old theme in production, and upload the new theme.

6. Test new theme in production.

7. Fix any bugs. Repeat testing.

8. Everything good? Remove maintenance lock.

For content updates, it's all done in the production site. This is where the production site gets out of sync with the dev site. So you may want to sync up the content changes from production to the dev site by cloning the production site into the dev domain. I've asked Gio to help with this task, and have only needed to ask him to do it once so far.