A bit of a rant and a brain pick… looking for suggestions, etc.
Some context first:
A client has a corporate site, and their in-house content manager/junior dev added simple e-commerce functionality to sell downloadable products.
After some work on the staging site, I was tasked with pushing the content live.
We use WP Engine, which allows staging to be pushed into production. However, the staging site was out of sync with production due to weekly blog posts, etc.
Because of that, and for other reasons I’ll discuss below, I decided to move things manually.
This push to production involved installing a couple of plugins, copying some custom functions into functions.php, and moving various content for the post-type "downloads."
Additionally, there were a few pages built in Elementor. Pushing individual pages in Elementor proved to be a bit of a pain. Some visual components transferred in a very wonky format and had to be manually fixed. There were also flexbox settings that needed to be tweaked in production to get the imports to work correctly.
All in all, It took me 4 hours, plus some hours from the content manager, to get this live.
The client thinks it was too much effort and too many post-push repairs.
In my opinion, with many years of WP experience, I thought this was to be expected given the little details and moving parts.
Even if we had a fully synced staging environment, I would be uneasy about pushing the entire codebase and database from staging to production, as I anticipated issues with license keys, API activations, hardcoded URLs, etc.
I mean, it’d be possible, but it would involve a round of repairs, search-and-replace, etc.
All in all, things are stable, but I’m a bit uncomfortable with the client’s perception that it should’ve gone faster and more effortlessly.
I’m curious—how do you all handle this? Do you deal with these "differentials" and merges? Plugins? Paid?
Thoughts?
</rant>
Sounds like the blog posts should have been created in both places so it doesn’t get out of sync. Then you could push from staging to prod without losing content. That being said, you are the expert here, not the client or his junior dev. I’d personally push back and state your reasoning to back up your expertise. Luckily, you’ll basically never have this problem again since the e-commerce functionality means you’ll never be able to sync from staging to prod unless you halt all registrations and purchases before syncing from prod to staging.