Website Maintenance

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1

Hi,

I would be grateful for a few suggestions for a good robust approach to website maintenance.

My usual approach is to copy all of a site’s files into a second password protected directory and carry out changes and tests in that directory before overwriting the same files in the live directory.

The downside of this approach is that the files in the development directory may not always version match those in the live area, that the paths may not match those of the live site and there may still be bugs when committing the changes and that synchronising between live and test is time consuming.

I’d also admit to occasionally doing changes on the fly and hoping that no-one’s on the site to notice any errors!

Wondered what others did here. Is there an affective mirroring option between public site and a testing version and one-click committing.

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions or ideas.

2

I have 3 areas that I work with. One is kind of a “raw” folder where I do preliminary changes (and keep backup copies for a while). When I think I’m ready to test, I move them to my “localhost” server and test there. Then when I think they’re bug free, I move them to my live host and test them again.

My site isn’t huge (but it’s not that small either), and it’s my personal site so I’m not under any time or quality constraints. I keep my WordPress plugins in sync with TortoiseSVN and that helps a lot. I’ve thought about using it for my site files too, but haven’t yet.

And yes, it sure can take a lot of time. But I’ve had the site for a long time and I make changes in manageable sized batches. Lucky for me it’s a passion because I sure wouldn’t want to have to pay somene else for all the hours I’ve put into it.