[newbreed]

Hi All –

We’re running into an issue with users where we actually lose all forum data in our pushing from staging to production, which is part of our regular workflow.

I’m wondering if others have encountered this, and what solution has worked best in the past? It’s been a pain point for our forum users, and we’re currently duplicating work between production and staging to keep the site up to date which is a bit laborious.

Cheers!

[Robin W]

so you have

a live site with user posting topics and replies
a staging site which you use to update themes, plugins and presumably pages and posts.

when you push the staging back to live, it overwrites the database, so deleting any entries users have made since last copying live to staging

Is that a correct summary ?

[newbreed]

Hi Robin,

That’s correct – we’re having issues within our normal process where staging is the first stop for any new content creation as well as testing of plugins or new development. Have you encountered this in the past, and do you perhaps have a fix?

[Robin W]

unfortunately no easy fix for this, I tend to use a site copy to test, and then replicate the chnages on live – it is obviously more work, but means the forum stays up to date

[newbreed]

That’s a bummer, but understandable. I was hoping there was a way around this with a plugin to manage users but it doesn’t seem viable.

I’ve suggested decoupling the forum from the main WP instance, which isn’t ideal for SEO reasons but of course much better than our other options in terms of losing forum data with each push. Is there any plan in the roadmap to change this experience?

[Robin W]

pushing staging to live is a hoster process, so would require your hoster software to recognise worpdress, bbpress and lots of other plugins, so highly unlikely