I set up a staging site from the live site with my hosting, A2 Hosting. The pages are all messed up, and in the browser console, I could see lots of mime type errors (photo for examples). The errors come from CSS and JS files from all the plugins and theme.
I do development on one box and use a second for production. Right now I just dump the database and then do a find a replace for the URL changes; then copy over the files and import the new SQL.
I have a problem with WordPress database synchronization between development and production and I am wondering how other people solving it. I am aware about this question but it doesn’t really cover the nastier and more realistic use case.
Here’s my setup. I have a Multisite instance running at http://example.com, and I want to do development and staging. Moving an existing Multisite instance of WP onto localhost is a nightmare, so I’m going to do dev on a staging location instead.
Question has been asked before about how to synchronize files as well as the database between two WordPress installations.
It is broadly accepted that developers should test updates through a staging site before releasing them to the live server, however once the development updates require modifications in WordPress DB, things get complicated, as users in the live site will update the DB too.