When developing a website usually there’s a production site and a staging site; as PB data is stored in the DB, how can you apply further development made in the staging site without overwriting user data in the production site?
Thanks
Suggested flow for updates once a project has been released
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Hi ReeX,
So to clarify, you want to move the staging site over to the production (database wise) but you don’t want to lose any user changes to pages made on the production site to be lost? If so, I’m not too sure of the migration method you’re using but you if able, exclude any postmeta row with a meta_key of “panels_data” as that’s what the Page Builder page data is stored in.
Users in the production site are only allowed to create posts and I will be the only person updating the site structure (pages and PHP templates), however there should be a way to export PB pages from the staging site to the production…. How can I achieve this?
Hi ReeX,
As in just the page builder data? If so, you can. Please open the page and click the layouts button in the page builder toolbar. Select Import/Export in the sidebar and download the layout. Move over to the main site and follow the same steps but this time, upload the layout.
Ah ok, thanks Alex! Is this a common routine ?
Hi ReeX,
For moving specific posts (as in nothing but them) from one site to another, yes.
I believe you also meant for pages….
Thanks!
Hi ReeX,
For any post type, yes.
Hi there Alex, I have made some thoughts and I feel a bit confused, mostly because I understand that once you have a live site and a staging site it may be tricky releasing updates, mostly because db partial overlapping of data.
I thought that this may be the only way to proceed deploying updates but it will require efforts and downtimes:
1. Make updates on a development site, keeping track of what has been modified, including wp settings
2. When ready, put the live site in maintenance mode
3. create a staging site (clone) of the live site
4. deploy updates from your development site to the staging site (as for pagebuilder, it will require exporting/import of templates)
5. final test on the staging site
6. Push the staging site to live
7. Unlock maintenance mode
It seems a very tricky (and may require hours of downtime) ….
I’d like to hear from you to evaluate the smoothest procedure to deploy updates from the staging site to live/production?
Hi ReeX,
That would be the easiest method of doing that if you’re unfamiliar with MySQL (as I can’t help you write the query :(). If you actually are, you could export all of panels_data from the development site and then replace the fields on the staging site.
To clarify, why do you have a development and a staging site? Removing one of those sites from the picture would remove a number of steps.
I thought a staging site is required because the users in the live site are updating the DB and the developer is doing the same on the test site (local). On deployment you have to merge these changes somehow, testing the merged “scenario” before pushing it to live.
So I thought that the only way to achieve this is to copy the latest version of the live site (user side DB) preventing users to further update the db (maintenance mode) and merge developers update into the staging site. Test all the mixture and if fine, push to live.
If you see an improvement on this bulky process I would appreciate to share with you! :-)