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#1 2010-08-20 08:43:37
- jamieknight
- New Member
- Registered: 2007-08-30
- Posts: 3
Textpattern Dev to live Deployment Scripting
Hiya guys,
Just thought i would poke my head in and say hello, let you know about a little project i have been working on to get your feedback / thoughts. I have been working on a project recently which required two environments, a development environment (where new ideas could be built, changed, tweaked, etc) and then the live environment. We develop the site in monthly cycles then deploy the development site to the live site once it has been approved. This is normally pretty straight forward but its starting to get more complex as the site becomes more active in 3 main areas:
1: Keeping track of database changes – changes to pages and forms are simple enough to track (we can simply swap the tables) but tracking preferences between the two builds has been a challenge, for example, some preferences on the development site will need to move to the live site (eg, custom form names) but others do not (eg: paths and url settings etc).
2: Article conflicts – between the development version of the site being taken, and the next development deployment new content is added to both sites which then conflict on ID (eg, on the development site we may add some new pages / sections, while on the live site the client will update blogs and news) when it comes time to merge those changes it can be challenging to keep track of which edits need to keep thier ID (eg, incase its used for a content block) or which articles can have thier ID changed on the move.
3: External Files, Images etc – This has mostly been taken care of via SVN, however syncing images files and prevent conflicts is also an issue.
As deploying the site is now taking longer and longer i find myself repeating the same tasks so i have started to develop a bit of a script. Right now its very basic (it creates a MySQL backup of the current table, and then changes a couple of table names from dev to live for things where changes are one direction only like sections & forms).
I was wondering if anyone in the community has worked on the same problems or would be interested in contributing to developing a simple textpattern deployment system. I am also looking at ways i can use textpatterns section structure to help with the deployment (eg, setting some sections to be strictly dev -> live and others to be a merge. so any ideas or advice here would also be greatly appreciated.
Hope that all makes some sense!
Cheers,
Jamie + Lion
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Re: Textpattern Dev to live Deployment Scripting
Hi Jamie
One quick suggestion is to use cnk_versioning to make page templates and forms accessible to svn.
Tracking changes to prefs and content tables is a perennial problem. I’d love to throw a few ideas around with you when I get a mo.
see ya
Stu
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#3 2010-08-23 14:22:39
- jamieknight
- New Member
- Registered: 2007-08-30
- Posts: 3
Re: Textpattern Dev to live Deployment Scripting
Hiya All,
@pieman – awesome, will pop you over an email :D
I have made a bit of a start on the script, just something simple. I have developed a little script which generates a page highlighting changes between two textpattern databases. At the moment it only compares articles and images and it only shows new items in each table.
If you fancy a play with it, you can grab the zip from my dropbox at http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1337995/txp%20merge%20manager.zip installation instructions are in the file.
Hope that is of some use, if you have any ideas, suggestions or bug fixes please post and i will see if i can help / integrate / fix them.
Cheers,
Jamie & Lion
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