php - How to use source control with Joomla while allowing users the ability to continue making content changes on the production server?
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While you briefly described your workflow, there are some things to be considered. There is no general rule, but look into the following suggestions:
Put into version control JUST the extensions you have developed (template, components, plugins etc.). The customizations are anyway the only things you add to Joomla. Hopefully no core hacks. Alternatively if you really want to version the whole installation, you should at least ignore media folders that are changed by the clients / you. I see no need to put the whole Joomla site under version control.
I imagine your clients are not actually changing PHP scripts, just media files and database entries. You should only push to production code and / or database schema changes.
If you are relying on a commit - push to FTP feature, or manually pushing files, I would suggest looking into building a distributable version of your changes, in a form of a package that can be deployed via the Extension manager. Building packages can be done in one click with a tool like Phing. For example if you make some changes to the template, create a new template version, create the package and update first the staging server / testing server and if all goes well, the production.
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Solution:
Some things shouldn't be in version control.
In general, source code should be versioned and data should not. I'm not familiar with Joomla, but any kind of "uploaded content" directory should be in the ignore file for your version control system. That way you can deploy changes to the software without worrying about overwriting data.
Of course, your data should be backed up regularly, but that's not what revision control is for.
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Solution:
If you have
- a staging server where you test the website changes (layout, new functionality, new css)
- a production server where the user publishes new content
you need partial database updates along with file synchronization.
The database is pretty hard as the assets table may be affected both by configuration changes on the staging server and by new content on the production server; for this and any other shared tables, we address the issue by making sure the ids don't conflict right after the update leaving a sufficient gap.
Although - to quote most other answers - revision control is not for data nor for the database, it is indeed very nice, especially with pre and post-commit hooks to perform the required database actions; however, any scripting/publishing tools going from rsync-rdiff to phing to ant - maven will do
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