Version Controlling Wordpress

We've struggled with this quite a bit at our company (http://thesiteslinger.com). Much of our web development business includes WordPress...We host most of our client sites on WPEngine so the git push feature has made a lot of it easier but keeping your .sql files versioned correctly from live and local development is a pain, to say the least.

I would disagree that everything can be left up to the one click updater, versioning it all is important. That assumes you aren't creating complex functionality on your site, so no updating tables, custom development or anything that changes more than views.

It will be interesting to see if WordPress can continue to improve and grow and get new users. From a growth perspective it seems more and more like wordpress:php as rails:ruby, bringing people to the platform en masse.

I do version control on my themes. What I ended up doing is having a repo outside the web server and setup a post receive hook that checks out the latest version to the actual public folder.

Could be used for intrusion detection too.

Thanks! This gave me some great ideas for how I can use this method in my own deployment process. The only exception is that many times I need to sync content both downstream and upstream.

For example, in one case I want up-to-date content from production down into dev for an enhancement I'll work on. In another case I'll want to create content in dev before publishing on production. Most of the time I actually do have domain specific URLs in the content so I'll need to use a different method to migrate content between environments.

Great post!

Maybe a database with immutable data, like datomic?