I must admit I got a little excited when I first started watching this video on getting off of making changes to Wordpress via FTP and on to deploying using GIT repositories in Beanstalk from a local development version. The screen cast was posted by Chris Coyier of CSS-Tricks. It’s pretty old, and granted it was made on the fly, but I was disappointed to see that the two of the three aspects of deployment I was excited about – 1) plugin updates and 2) database changes would not be included in this process. Although credential sync crashed and burned during the demo, it could easily be handled by telling the software to ignore the wp-config.php file. Otherwise the process would be good only for CSS or other template changes, which is probably what the author of CSS-Tricks was after anyway.
Just to confirm this wasn’t what I was after, I took a look at the Beanstalk Guide to Deploying WordPress, and confirmed that database changes would need to be deployed manually. Bummer.
When I worked on a corporate web team for a large company, we had a custom script we would run that would publish changes made on the development server to the live site. It was very nice. With that stuck in my memory banks, I was still excited at the prospect of learning how to do that with WordPress, so I searched on.
I found an article on Carrie Dils Blog. I am very familiar with Carrie’s blog, which contains many helpful articles about working with the Genesis Framework. Unfortunately, her deployment of WordPress changes is very manual as well. Additional searching was unfruitful.
So for now, I guess I will stick with my current process, which is manual but solid, and keep looking.