Dancing With the Stars, a Boston WordPress Meetup Talk on the Website Update Process

Last night (7/26/2010) I gave a talk at the Boston WordPress Meetup on how to do website updates. It was well attended (probably 50-60 developers and designers.) It was great fun and was well received. A lot of good questions. I had a lot of help from James Coletti, one of the organizers, and of course Vishesh brought the Architect/Developer perspective.

The basic topics covered the use of multiple environments, source control, managing data versus files, testing, and backups and rollbacks. We also covered two approaches to updates, one using SVN and the other using Capistrano, which uses Make-like files.

While there are some specific mentions of WordPress-oriented tools, much of the talk is applicable, not only to other CMS products (think Drupal and Joomla), but to software products and websites in general.

Someone already pointed out that there should be another test step after initially recreating the production site on the release test site (I updated the slide to reflect that.) Any other steps you regard as good practice that I've missed? Let us know!

Dancing With the Stars slide deck (PDF)
Find a video of the presentation on the Boston WordPress Blog