Ongoing sync between dev and prod servers

Hello,

I’ve been using MODx for about 5 months to maintain a site built by another company. The thing that’s killing me is that I need to be able to run two versions of the site: a development/staging site where I can show my client the latest changes, and then the production site.

I’ve tried a few approaches, none of which are very satisfying:
1) Run two instances of MODx - one behind http://dev.site.com and the other behind http://www.site.com. I end up doing all the edits twice, which has proven to be horrific because it’s time consuming, my document IDs have gotten out of sync, etc. Still, this is what I do right now.

2) Run only one copy of MODx, behind the dev site. Using my own sync tool (a combo of wget and rsync), sync out the changes to the prod site. I tried this a while ago but had to abandon it because the recursive walk via wget failed to get standalone pages. (I have a few landing pages that are only linked from outside via ads and partnerships.)

I’m basically looking for what’s described here:
http://modxcms.com/bugs/task/437

Am I the only person who has this issue? All the FAQs appear to be about one-time sync. How have people managed this issue? I’d love to hear your workarounds.

Thanks,
Vik

I have the same problem and every two months when I publish a new issue of my magazine it’s serious PT to synch the databases, I’ve been doing it manually using SQLYog Enterprise and hand-written sql commands.

Since I’ve moved comments over to Jot the job has become easier, but synching tv values like "docrating" is still quite a mission although I have learnt alot of mysql over the months.
Personally I wish there was an easier way to deal with this and can only hope that 1.0 will have a different approach to this.

We all experience this pain point and this was part of the motivation of 1.0; not only will we be able to migrate files and database records from one installation to another, but you’ll be able to do it across various database platforms even. So theoretically, you could run a MySQL local development environment, publish to a dev area using Oracle, and then publish again to an Oracle-powered production instance. This will all be part of the new packaging and installation system that is being implemented for the next generation of MODx, which can be used to distribute everything from the core itself, to generic add-ons, to dev environment updates to production sites.