By 2c on

I'm using shared hosting. I'd like to be able to do work on the content of my live site offline. I have two questions:

1: What provisions do you make for adding/removing modules to a Drupal production site so that there are reduced chances of errors/bugs etc. occuring?

2: If you had to, how would you manage updating a live site with content created offline. I write content offline and then when it's finished I want to put it online...this could be several pages worth of content and I'd like this done as quickly as possible; ideally automatically.

I have some ideas for solutions and I'd like to here opinions:

1: Create an offline test site with tech specs similar to my shared hosting. When the new functionality has been tested, carry out the same steps on the live site.

OR

Create a replica of the live site in a different folder on the web server and test everything from there.

This introduces a related question:

How do you update your live site from your test site? How do you track/rollback changes made to the test site that are different (and maybe erroneous) to the live site?

2: Export an SQL file using PHP admin of tables affected and import it into live server (also using PHPMYADMIN). Could I write a script for this?

Comments

Steve Halleman’s picture

Steve Halleman commented

There is a section from the Handbook that might be of help. It talks about how to set up a test site on the server so new features can be copied to the production site without having to re-enter everything.

http://drupal.org/node/22282

Steve Halleman