[wp-hackers] absolute URLs in plug-ins and custom types

["Matthias P. Würfl"]

Am 06.07.2012 22:51, schrieb Bryan Petty:
> On 07/06/2012 02:08 PM, Otto wrote:
>> >On Fri, Jul 6, 2012 at 11:09 AM, Shasta Willson<shastaw at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> >>I have to agree with Bryan. I consider the move to deployment (and
>>> >>maintenance of a matching testing server) one of the weakest areas of
>> >
>> >Why are you "deploying" your content in the first place?
>> >
>> >The notion of development->testing->production is fundamentally a
>> >software or manufacturing notion. It doesn't make a whole heck of a
>> >lot of sense to be forcing your writers/authors/content-creators to
>> >use that same approach.
> It does if they are developing themes around your content, especially
> when that content revolves around custom post types, and tons of
> metadata. Remember, content precedes design [1,2,3].

I agree with that.

Whenever a theme, a post type, a plugin or whatever is modified/updated 
i check this with real content. So the content moves from live to dev. 
When development is done there needs to be some content in testing. I 
use a copy of the live data for this. Customers won't accept looking at 
the "preview of the new website" with test-content typed by monkeys. So 
there's a need for content to move around.

And this is just content. There's a lot of settings and stuff in the 
database with absolute URIs in it.

I found out i have to draw a distinction between:

- 3rd party code (Wordpress Core)
- My Code (includes projects settings)
- Settings (what differs from host to host dev/stage/etc)
- Data
- temporary files (cache)

each one of these has to be treated different. This is easy with the 
files. I keep Wordpress in a subdirectory and have some svn externals 
and svn::ignores. This works for me, but when it comes to the database 
it's a mess. The absolute URIs are just the tip of the iceberg.

Grüße, Matthias