This has been on my mind a lot lately, and I was wondering what other people’s practice was.
For a typical on-going-development client, I will create two domains:
company.com
staging.company.com
staging.company.com will usually have a simple .htaccess user/pwd on it to keep out casual viewing. Staging is used to present modifications to the client without disrupting the client’s production site.
I’ll then create two FTP destinations in RW, Production and Staging, which go to the obvious places.
This normally works fine, except for some stacks that particularly care about the root and/or actual domain name of the site (CMS stacks, in particular, get wrapped around the axle about this).
There seems to be a simple fix RW could do to make staging a website in this manner easier: give us the option of changing the domain name and root based on the FTP destination.
Right now, I manually change the project’s root domain while working (to staging.*) and then change it back to the production domain when I went to publish to production.
However, this seems counter-productive, since I have the ability to set different FTP destinations for precisely this reason - you don’t want to have keep manually changing the project just because you’re publishing to a beta vs production site.
Additionally, for small changes, that just require the client to approve quickly, it’s somewhat of a hassle.
For larger, gross changes to the website, I don’t have a problem just creating a new version of the project.
I guess this is more of an ongoing maintenance issue for me…
I was wondering how other people were handling it…