How can we set up a solid test site with Network (sub-domains) enabled?

  • Erlend

    (@sadr)


    12 years, 9 months ago

    Sites:
    jmonkeyengine.org
    jmonkeyengine.com

    We’ve set up a Webmin for our site. One of our developers has constructed a really handy script in Webmin’s “Custom Commands“, enabling us to make a near exact clone of our live site, moving it over to test.jmonkeyengine.org. Same goes for test.jmonkeyengine.com. Both these sites reside on the same dedicated server, as do the test sites, all in their respective root folders of course. We find this to be an excellent way to test all kinds of new updates and experimental tweaks before actually applying them to our live site.

    Enabling WordPress network would make some crucial parts of our website easier to navigate and manage, but like everything else it comes with caveats. Testing is one of them. Question is, could we feasibly maintain the test setup we have going, with a WordPress Network?

    I’m not a very technical guy, but I’m seeing two possible options:

    1) We do a sub-directory install. This should enable the cloning script to go about its business as usual, as there’s no tricky domain changes involved. If we still wanted to apply sub-domains, I suppose maybe we could still do that by using the MU Domain Mapping plugin, or by setting up our own masks(?). I don’t know how well that would go over with various SEO plugins though, e.g. analytics & sitemaps.

    2) We do a sub-domain install. However instead of pointing the script to test.jmonkeyengine.org (because it’s a sub-domain already that makes it incompatible, right?) we’d point it to some domain like jmonkeytest.org, that could handle sub-domains. Maybe some changes would have to be made in .htaccess and so forth either in the script or by hand. Whether or not it’d be worth the otherwise convenient test setup remains to be seen.

    Does anyone have any experience with this type of setup?

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