I am making a WordPress website and I might create new builds. How will I keep back up or save my latest builds, I would prefer to use and manage builds through github. Is there a particular way that I can do it in WordPress?
Simple way to install this plugin and create your WordPress backup and download it :
https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicator/
I used gitwatch to automatically commit new code to a Github repository. This included new uploads and new plugins. Just follow the ReadMe and it works pretty well.
This is an example of a website where I used this technique.
Words of Caution
Use .gitignore to exclude your wp-config.php file so that database credentials etc are not stored to github.
Be careful not to dump your database to the wordpress directly (which
would automatically commit it to Github).
Be careful of plugins
that write sensitive stuff to a file that might get committed.
I am aware of Kerchoff's law, or not attempting security through
obscurity, but I am not stupid about the risks of automatically
publishing all of your configuration publicly. The site above is not
a high profile complex site (and I generally like to think I know
what I'm doing). DO NOT do this at home if your website is handling
sensitive information or could be at risk of anything more targeted
than a general Wordpress security flaw dragnet on Google.
One partial solution to these concerns would be to just make the Git repository private.
Finally if you are dealing with European data you need to comply with GDPR
which means you need to be ready to scrub a file from Git history
using something like BFG
You are addressing two different things. For backups, there are WordPress backup plugins that you can use like updraft (here's the link: https://wordpress.org/plugins/updraftplus/). But when it comes to development workflow then GitHub is the right platform. If you want to know how to work in a live environment and how to push and pull the latest changes from local to live or vice versa
(to keep track) then this guide will help you. https://www.cloudways.com/blog/wordpress-github/
Related
A few months ago I created a staging Wordpress site to implement some changes on my website. The databases run on phpMyAdmin (although I'm not sure if this is relevant). I would like to save the comments (the ones that are already published and the ones I've received recently), so my plan is to save them as it follows:
Save all comments and disallowed IPs from the regular website. I believe this is done by downloading the Commentmeta and Comment databases, although I'm not 100% sure. Are there other relevant databases?
Import those comments to the staging site.
Export the whole staging site (databases and webspace) to the regular website and let it run all the updates.
If this isn't the right way to do it or you know a better / more effective / safer method I'd appreciate to know it.
I'm trying to locate the file in which the Comment Blacklist / Disallowed List of my website is stored. I don't use any comment plugins besides the Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, although I don't think this one would store the data I'm looking for.
I'm fairly new to web developing, but I'm not sure if this file should be on a specific database or on a certain folder of the webspace, so all insights are welcome and much appreciated!
I'm researching to see if building a full website for a hotel be a good idea to do on WordPress.
I read that wordpress is okay but there are better options.
I want to design and code my own front end look to the website, but have the backend on a stable platform that can take all the reservations seamlessly.
My main concern is to be able to have a backup of all the files and easily switch to another server in case something goes wrong.
I can host the website on my server or host with the service you suggest that comes with the platform all together.
Any ideas and/or suggestions are greatly appreciated!
There are other options, no doubt, but yes, it can and is really possible to build it using WordPress as CMS.
If you want to design and code your own theme, you'll need to study the WordPress Theme Structure and, since you'll build it by yourself, you'll also need to develop plugins to create custom post types (aka CPT) to make the hotel management easier on the WP back-end.
About the theme structure, files, child themes and everything, I'd recommend you to read https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development
About the plugins development: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/
About Custom Post Types: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/post-types/registering-custom-post-types/
About the backup: it's super easy and you can even make a full backup using free plugins via back-end. But if the site goes down you can easily do it via FTP downloading only wp-content folder and the database. It's really simple to migrate from one WordPress to another, or from host to host.
About the hosting, you'll need to use a server if you want to build this project. There's a difference between wordpress.com and wordpress.org
The .com is simpler, you are not able to build everything you want. The .org is the open source project, which you get the files, upload to your server and connect to database (MariaDB or MySQL). Most hosts offer automatic installation for WordPress and, from there, you can change whatever you want and need.
Note: many developers create CPTs INSIDE the theme's code, but this is not recommended by WP as you can see in We recommend that you put custom post types in a plugin rather than a theme. This ensures that user content remains portable even if they change their theme.
WP is not really hard, after 1 week studying you'll see yourself getting over most difficulties. Even if it takes longer, don't give up. There's a huge community to help you with WP questions.
Hope it helps and I'm sorry my bad writing, I'm not an english native speaker.
C ya
I want to set up a system where a developer can work on a separate server on a wordpress website.
My question is: If in the meantime changes are made to the live site (like plugin updates, new plugins, new posts, new comments, etc), how is one able to import a new feature (e.g. a new page) from the development server on the live site while making sure that previous changes on the live site don't get deleted?
I am looking to understand how this all works. In a sense, I would like to have some kind of version control system.
Thanks in advance :)
You can version control your own code using git. Basically we would init a new git repo and commit changes onto this repository. This can lie separately outside of the core files. i.e you only need to include the wp-content directory and ignore all the other core wordpress files.
Here is a good article on how to do a really good versioning system for a website.
http://toroid.org/git-website-howto
The posts and pages (basically content) in a wordpress site however lies in the database.Any changes made there will be permanent.
The only option is to keep taking regular backups of the content. You can do this by using an automated backup tool.
If you really want to version control your database, here is an article that helps:
https://blog.codinghorror.com/get-your-database-under-version-control/
This one is a tricky one. You cant host a single website on two servers. Just imagine a website having 2 hosted urls..!! No way.. You can never do that.
You better create a new user and give access to him. Look carefully in the settings and be a admin. You will have a chance to approve or reject what the second user changes.
Hope this helps.
Well, with entirely file-based CMS you can easily put the whole directory into version control system to record any changes to the site. The synchronization with the server would be also trivial because it would only involve uploading the files via ftp.
With these benefits in mind, I am a little puzzled about the popularity of databases as the only storage mode, even when the CMS in question is meant to be used by amateurs for small websites.
How does your versioning and synchronization workflow looks like?
What kind of simplified versioning/synchronization workflow would you suggest for a casual, non-tech, WordPress user, to give them the benefit of working locally and encouraging them to have a backup of their site?
Most CMS systems nowadays tend to have some or other backup solution in place to help you. Since Wordpress is a CMS for the masses and also caters for the non-tech population, you're sure to find a plugin that can help you with this. I know it's built-in backup solution just backups posts etc. to XML, but even this does a pretty decent job of restoring over a clean wordpress installation and working fine.
But I found this plugin (which works for Wordpress and Joomla) by asking Google, which most probably is the answer to your question: XCloner
Also in terms of workflow, specifically for Wordpress, don't give the user Admin privileges, but editor or contributor or something, so they can still edit content, etc. but not make changes that could mess up the CMS itself. And maybe this XCloner plugin can do some kind of recurring backup or something. Otherwise, I suggest you move to a LAMP stack hosting environment where you can at least have cron jobs setup to backup your databse and files regularly. Most hosing companies do this in any case at no cost.
Wordpress also keeps revisions of all posts and pages, so if a user doesn't like an update they've made, the full revision history is available. Be sure to check screen options at the top to see that Revisions is checked, if you aren't seeing this option. Kind of a nice built-in.
Can also (depending on host) have scheduled database/file backups through cPanel, in addition to scheduled database backup plugins through WordPress. Some will save remotely or even email the database out.
I want to move a drupal site to another domain and am looking for best practices, gotchas, hint, tips, etc to make sure I get through it smoothly.
Links and comments are appreciated.
You might want to give a try to the Backup And Migrate module.
There is also this handbook page that gives instructions on how to backup your drupal site.
It took me 1-2 hours. I do not have a step-by-step guide (I wish I had written everything down), but it entails updating the configuration files, updating the database (some tables have domain references, but I don't recall which - it could be that this was just for my image references in the Gallery2 database), and doing a cursory search of the content for full domain references in anchor links.
I migrated a Drupal 6 site with about 40 plug-ins, including Gallery2 and Google Maps integration, and I did not run into any major road blocks.
If you (and the authors of the contrib modules you used) did a good job by not putting absolute URL's in the code, it should be dead easy (I do it routinely when migrating the development site to a live production one, for its launch).
Of course I assume that you are doing things sensibly, and for example are not migrating a site from an apache/mySQL server to a nginx/postgres one, maybe also adding the need to prefix your DB tables in the process.
If this is the case, then you simply have to copy your entire file tree and export/reimport your DB.
If you are migrating between two similar architectures then chances are you will only have to change a few things in the settings.php file. The file is well documented. The only two things that I normally have to change are:
DB user/pass
cookies domain
In the file there are also additional configuration options like the possibility to choose the base URL manually in case of problems.
Don't forget to flush the cache once you log in the new migrated site for the first time.
EDIT: Just came to my mind: if you use any, you will also have to update your developer keys to third party API's (for example if you use google maps or google analytics) as these are domain specific.
HTH!
Basically, what mac said (+1)
In addition, I often need to adjust the .htaccess files a bit concerning the rewrite rules. For smaller sites on shared hosting environments, I usually place the drupal installations in subfolders within the document root (e.g. to allow for staging, etc.), 'hiding' the subfolder via URL rewriting. So for every 'move' of a site, I need to fix those rules.
The biggest culprit for me are sites that use modules that have to store absolute URLs in order to do their job (e.g. securepages). For those you should disable them prior to moving the site, adjusting their settings before reenabling.
If you are not sure if some of the modules you use store absolute URLs, it might pay of to extract your database dump locally and search the resulting file for occurrences of 'http://', 'https://' and the likes, as well as for your 'old' domain name (you'll need to exclude the watchdog and cache tables for this).