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Eleanor Heins
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February 3, 2017 at 2:42 pm
Hi there!
EE4, most current WordPress version.
We have pulled down a copy of our website into staging to make large overhauls. None of the overhauls have anything to do with Event Espresso. We are already on EE4, everything is fine.
As those overhauls are in progress on staging, people are happily filling out registrations on the production website. No new events are being during this time or other changes – that’s intentional. The team knows that the production website is on Code Freeze…however, it’s being used by customers and transactions via EE4 are being taken in.
When we push from staging to production, my expectation would be that any new registrations will have been deleted.
Naturally, deleting transactions is bad. Or I’m grossly mistaken here.
Question:
When I push from staging to production, will any new registrations and information from customers that have been processing while we’re in development be deleted?
If so, how can I back this up and add it “back in” once I push from staging to production? I don’t want to just back up the entire WordPress table, because I’ve made significant changes to the website that involves that table and that would not work.
Is there another option I’ve not thought of?
Thanks!
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Josh
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February 3, 2017 at 2:49 pm
When I push from staging to production, will any new registrations and information from customers that have been processing while we’re in development be deleted?
Yes they will, if you’re pushing data from staging to production.
Maybe I don’t understand, but why would you push data from staging to production? Does the nature of the work being done on staging involve making changes to the database? Usually you would only push file changes (i.e. new theme files, new plugin files, changes to theme files) from staging to production. Then you leave the production database intact.
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Eleanor Heins
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February 3, 2017 at 4:33 pm
Excellent answer, and exceedingly fast.
I (perhaps moronically) assumed staging was a full snapshot of the entire website, database and all. I’ll check the WPEngine staging process to see.
I would love this to be a misunderstanding on my part. Will advise.
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Eleanor Heins
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February 5, 2017 at 3:25 pm
Hi there! I’ve reviewed with WPEngine. Here are the facts, would like your thoughts on how to resolve.
1. I am able to access registrations from staging. Staging on WPEngine is a copy of the full production website. This is pretty common, and the only way WPEngine does a staging environment that I know of.
2. I am able to access all of event espresso, including registrations all the way up to January 22nd, in the staging environment.
3. I have confirmed that anything I can access will overwrite what is on production. Therefore, new registrations after January 22nd will get wiped as I’ll be replacing the production site with an old version of the registrations.
QUESTION: Can I export registrations and manually re-import those when they get deleted from the migration from staging to live?
Here is the exact transcription of my conversation with WPEngine.
WPEngine: “Pushing from staging to live will replace everything thats on your live site with things that are on your staging site, so if that data isn’t in staging, it would get wiped because the push didn’t contain it”
ME: “Event Espresso, excellent product by the way, doesn’t believe people’s event registrations will get overwritten, but from my experience anything available in staging will overwrite the production environment. It’s just how it works. So, I’m going to have to ask them to somehow export and re-import registrations from live to staging and then push. does that sound accurate to you?”
WPEngine: “Correct; its akin to customers who have woocommerce shopping carts, and need to export their orders to re-import them when pushing from staging to live. woocommerce just happens to have a lot of extra 3rd party support so its easier for them.”
Thoughts? Fortunately, ONLY registrations have changed. We’d like to still be able to easily access all new registrations from the EE dashboard.
I would be happy to give you credentials to my staging site if needed.
Thank you!
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Josh
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February 6, 2017 at 8:13 am
ME: “Event Espresso, excellent product by the way, doesn’t believe people’s event registrations will get overwritten, but from my experience anything available in staging will overwrite the production environment. It’s just how it works.
I think you misunderstood my earlier reply. IF you push the data from staging to live, the registration and event data on live will be deleted.
Instead of using WPEngine’s push staging to live feature, can you not simply copy the files (using SFTP) from staging to live?
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Eleanor Heins
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February 6, 2017 at 8:52 am
Ah. Yes, I did misunderstand. My apologies.
Well, here is the question. We’ve made large level changes to the website, top down and bottom up. This is not just a change in some stylesheets and a few additional pages.
I’m unsure where EE’s isolated areas are. If you tell me what NOT to push that is VERY specific to Event Espresso, then that’s a potential. It will need to be surgical. What, specifically, should I not be pulling over? Can you be extremely specific about this? I’d like to push everything except for Event Espresso.
Thoughts?
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Josh
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February 6, 2017 at 9:23 am
I don’t think it’s possible because Event Espresso writes to the wp_posts table, wp_options, a few other native WP tables, in addition to the tables it adds. So if you were to attempt to only push tables that are not added by EE (they’re all prefixed with esp) your options tables and wp_posts table will be out of sync between live and staging.
So instead of pushing everything except for Event Espresso, you can instead look at only pushing data from staging to live where absolutely needed.
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Eleanor Heins
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February 7, 2017 at 6:24 pm
AH. I know that WP_Posts and WP-Options have been adjusted.
So, I’ll take it there is no way to export registrations and transactions RE the Woo Commerce example and reimport upon the push to production?
Basically, confirming here there is no “easy” way to make major changes to the website without either erasing the most recent data, or going through and finding everything but tables that are not prefixed with ESP. Right?
Thanks for your help! Big fan of the product, great value and tons of functionality.
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Josh
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February 7, 2017 at 6:37 pm
It depends on what the major changes to the website involve. If the content of the website is what’s getting changed it’s generally not an easy task to merge specific parts of database tables across sites. You could take a look at Mergebot though. I haven’t used it personally, but it was built for the scenario you’ve asked about here:
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mergebot/
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