Deploying a new theme: best practise?

Hi there folks 🙂

I’m relatively new to WP (being a Drupal kind of guy), but loving it thus far!

I’ve been developing a new theme for someone’s blog, which I’ve been doing on a testbed site. I’ve been testing it with an import of data recently exported from their site, and so far everything’s fine.

It’ll soon be time to go live, and I’m wondering what is considered to be the best practise for actually doing that? (Apart from backing everything up twelvety times, of course).

The main consideration is that the live blog has new content in it since I took my data export, I don’t know what might have been lost in that data export, and there have been some necessary changes to the content alongside the new theme (widgets moved, custom page types made, and hierarchical structure imposed..). There’s also the fact that the testbed has a different domain name and home folder structure to the live site.

It seems to me that my options are:

1) Take a fresh export from the live site, re-create the new pages needed and order them into their hierarchy, same with the widgets etc, then re-export the data to the live site, copy the theme over, and import/activate everything

2) Copy the testbed file-structure over to the live site lock-stock-and-barrel in FTP. Ditto for the database in PHPMyAdmin.

3) Just copy the theme over, activate it, and then make the page changes on the fly (there’s not a huge number of them).

What do you folks do?

Cheers

Charlie