I’m, like everybody else it appears, on the hunt for an answer to the Content material Syncing Downside. If Alice and Bob are every working domestically on their dev websites, creating and modifying content material, and in the meantime the consumer is doing the identical on stay, how can everybody’s modifications be deployed with out something being overwitten (and with out Alice and Bob merely repeating their GUI actions on stay?)
My analysis to this point has turned up a couple of makes an attempt to model your complete database – reminiscent of VersionPress and MergeBot, each of that are now not maintained, and WPMerge, which is sort of costly at c.$100 per web site. Which implies $10,000 if your organization maintains 100 WP websites…
That is as a result of it is a arduous drawback. Getting dev into the identical state as stay is straightforward sufficient – simply change the entire dev database with the one from stay (anonymised & url-replaced). However the different means is tough as a result of we do not need Alice or Bob’s modifications to overwrite the consumer’s, or certainly every others’.
I feel I’ll have discovered a approach to clear up this, not for the entire database, however simply the pages, posts, menus, customized fields – issues which might be more likely to change often, and take a variety of work, and would due to this fact profit probably the most from a extra streamlined workflow (in contrast to, say, plugin configuration and settings choices, which change much less usually & take much less work to use, so might simply be re-done manually).
Superior Customized Fields Professional has the Native JSON possibility which shops customized discipline metadata as json, in order that a part of the issue is solved.
For posts and pages (and menu objects, which could be added as a customized endpoint), might the WP JSON API could possibly be used, I’m wondering, in one thing just like the the next means?
A plugin which, when configured for the dev web site, hooks into the method of the developer creating, updating or deleting entities through the GUI, and generates recordsdata with names like update_post_<slug> or create_menu_<slug>, containing the related JSON information. These can then be dedicated to git, and when pushed to grasp, automated deployment would handle doing the API calls on stay, replaying the modifications. The plugin would supply assist for that.
If this labored it will keep away from the overwriting points that you simply get when simply deploying the entire database from dev to stay.
Suppose Alice is including a brand new menu domestically, and while she does so, Bob is including a submit, domestically, elsewhere. The consumer, in the meantime, is modifying the content material on the house web page. If Bob and Alice each get SQL dumps from stay at 10am, then do their work, if Bob finishes at 10:30 and "syncs" his native database to stay by merely overwriting it, the consumer’s work for the final half hour will probably be misplaced. And if Alice then does her "syncing" at 10:31, Bob’s work will probably be blown away, too.
Whereas with this as-yet-fictional plugin, Bob’s submit being added would generate an API name to create the submit, and when pushed to stay it will not overwrite something however simply add the submit to no matter is there. After which Alice’s change would create the menu, and never overwrite something both.
It would not clear up the issue of the precise kind of merge battle that may happen if a number of folks have been modifying the identical piece of content material on the similar time. However neither does WPMerge, nor certainly the online editor! So I do not suppose that is too unhealthy.
There’d be a problem if folks created a number of posts with the identical slug. However presumably the API POST calls would fail, and the CI server might detect the error and fail the construct. Then there would should be some guide interplay. However it’s unlikely to be a standard prevalence.
This appears to me prefer it might work and wouldn’t be terribly arduous to write down. However I feel there have to be one thing I am lacking, as a result of if it was actually that straightforward I am certain it will have been accomplished already (and I hope it has, but when so I have not discovered it!). So I might be eager to listen to what you suppose the catch is perhaps, earlier than I waste any time making an attempt to write down it…