Configuring Staging Site to Push Live
I recently created a staged site for my blog/website. Over the past week, on my staging site I did the following:
-added a couple of pages
-put some custom css to a few existing pages
-rearranged some widgets
-updated plugins
-updated WP
All looks fine on the staged site.
Prior to pushing "Live" I obviously want to push these changes over, but I'd like to be sure I am not writing over all the posts & comments made by users this past week. I am not quite sure how to customize the "Push to Live" settings to make this happen, and would rather not try by trial and error.
Looks like:
Default Setting--overwrites all, so I WOULD lose all recent posts, comments, etc.
Customize Settings:
Files/Folders--Would this be all that's needed to push over all changes mentioned above?
Push Full Database -- Again, if selected looks like I would lose all recent user posts, etc.
Choose Changes in Table-- 12 selections are listed. I am unsure what if anything, selecting (or not) any of these items
would have.
Does anyone have a good idea of WHAT and what not I should select to push live to incorporate the mentioned changes, while not losing recent posts/comments?
Thanks
Hello Anthony 185,
Thanks for your question about pushing the staging site live and possibly overwriting existing posts. A staged site has a separate database and WordPress is a "database-centric" application. This means that your live site has ALL of the existing posts and changes made by users during the week, as you have indicated. Pushing a staging site live will REPLACE that database and those changes will overwrite any posts made by your users for the past week.
There are a number of plugins that allow you to merge the databases, or you can determine the tables and (and uploads) that were made in your old site. Unfortunately, most of the plugins that can do this for you are not free (example: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-staging/). If you were to do it manually, you would need to take the contents of the comments table and any file from your uploads folder and move them to your new site AFTER you pushed the staging site live.
I hope this helps to answer your question. If you have any further questions or comments, please let us know.
Kindest Regards,
Arnel C.