Change process for ModX web builders?

I am used to working in a simple change process (solo developer) where I have
local webdev directory with what is being worked on
which then gets tried on a
local testing server directory (Apache) for testing
and, if it’s OK gets copied (ftp’d) from the local webdev directory to
the live server
(where of course it promply falls apart...) - but ignoring that last bit:

Clearly if I am enabling the end user to update their content on the live server, albeit in a controlled and restricted way, then I am losing control over that process.

Notably, the only place where a known valid and current copy of the website exists is on the server (assuming it is valid and hasn’t gone wobbly).

Is there any utility for managing this?

I mean something that would enable you to have your local copy of the modxified website, a connection to the remote (live) one, and allow you, for example to:
read a chunk from your local db and write it to the remote one?
or synch local and remote db (and files) based on timestamps

..or am I misunderstanding something about the right way of working with this?

sorry posted in wrong bit - meant to be in modx 101

Not sure if I understand what you are trying to achieve here, but if it’s as I understand then I would also like to know if there is an answer to this.
I find it annoying that to make a small update for a client (which I find I’m doing repeatedly while a site is in the nearing completion stage) I need to go to the remote modx manager and go

• Tools > Backup
• Select all tables
• Deselect system settings table
• select Generate drop statements
• backup
• copy all generated text
• open phpmyadmin and select database
• paste in SQL and import
• clear cache
• make updates (the quick bit!
• and then reverse the entire process to sync remote to newlyupdated local database! Arrrgh!

If we could simply add the remote and local databases locations to a config file at the beginning of a project development and then simply click a "Sync local to remote" or "Sync remote to local" button, now that would be awesome, absolutely awesome (and slightly dangerous!)
I would write such a plugin if I had some clue how!

Actually at one time Scotty Delicious (WebLoginPE and TreasureChest) had begun a very interesting Mac application for managing MODx from the desktop. It’s all in the database; you could (in fact, I have on occasion) access the database from a local MySQL client.

Provisioner sounds close to what you want, but it’s only available for Revolution at present: http://modxcms.com/extras/package/563

under xampp/windows for example you can create a .bat-file with something like that:



creates a local sql-dump with given tables from your remote-database and recreates your tables on your local machine with one click.

Or try something like heidisql and copy tables from remote to local.
I use heidisql for most of mysql-transactions.

Provisioner sounds close to what you want, but it’s only available for Revolution at presen

, true, but reading this thread has got me thinking, now we have the revogateway package for provisioning from evolution sites, we could leverage this for evolution<->evolution sites.

We could write a module for evo that acts like a provisioner 3PC in revo, Ok, this would take much more work than provisioner did as we don’t have the pre-built modext components in evo, but if we start maybe with basic stuff like ’sync all my resources’ it becomes more doable.

Maybe we could just implement a ’sync’ module as described above, or something like it anyway.

Thanks for the insightful responses to this. Been away from ModX for a few weeks but currently re-immersing myself and migrating the site I was working on from 1.04 to 2.0. Just downloaded Provisioner - which certainly sounds like it provides at least some of what I am looking for - will let you know how I get on.

Thanks to wdnz for the clear explanation of his/her change process, and I will check out Heidisql too as suggested by Bruno17.