WordPress Content Staging

Environments

You need to set up two environments:

• Content Staging (where content editors do their work).
• Production (the publicly accessible environment).

The Content Staging environment need access to xmlrpc.php on the Production environment (wordpress/xmlrpc.php).

The Production environment need access to the attachments directory (usually wordpress/wp-content/uploads) on the Content Staging environment.

Installation

Add the content-staging plugin to your plugins directory (e.g. wordpress/wp-content/plugins) on both environments.

Activate the plugin on both environments.

Configuration

Alternative 1 - WP Admin

Go into Content Staging > Settings to add your staging key (one can be generated from the page) as well as your production site endpoint URL.'

Important - Make sure you copy your staging key to your production site.

Alternative 2 - WP Config File

You can override settings done in WP Admin by defining specific constants in your config file (e.g. your wp-config.php file).

Add the following to your config file on your Content Staging environment:

define( 'CONTENT_STAGING_SECRET_KEY', '_SAME_RANDOM_KEY_ON_BOTH_ENVIRONMENTS_' );
define( 'CONTENT_STAGING_ENDPOINT', 'https://www.YOUR-PRODUCTION-SITE.com' );
define( 'CONTENT_STAGING_TRANSFER_TIMEOUT', 60 );

Add the following to your config file on your Production environment:

define( 'CONTENT_STAGING_SECRET_KEY', '_SAME_RANDOM_KEY_ON_BOTH_ENVIRONMENTS_' );
define( 'CONTENT_STAGING_ENDPOINT', 'https://www.YOUR-CONTENT-STAGE.com' );

Important! Make sure to add these configuration values before any require statements, e.g. before:

require_once( ABSPATH . 'wp-settings.php' );

Deploy Process

A batch goes through five different steps on its way to the production environment. These steps are:

• Create - Runs on content stage. User creates a batch and decides what posts to include.
• Prepare - Runs on content stage. Prepare batch data that we want to send to production.
• Verify - Runs on production. Verifies that batch data can be imported on production.
• Deploy - Runs on content stage. Send batch data to production.
• Import - Runs on production. Imports batch data.

Hooks

Many of the hooks follow a naming schema that indicates at what point in the deployment process they are triggered:

Environment	When	Hook Prefix
Content Stage	Before batch is populated	sme_prepare
Content Stage	After batch is populated	sme_prepared
Content Stage	Before pre-flight	sme_preflight
Production	During pre-flight	sme_store
Production	During pre-flight	sme_verify
Production	After pre-flight	sme_verified
Content Stage	After pre-flight	sme_preflighted
Content Stage	Before deploy	sme_deploy
Content Stage	During deploy	sme_deploying
Production	During deploy	sme_import
Production	After deploy	sme_imported
Content Stage	After deploy	sme_deployed

For a complete list of hooks, search the content-staging directory for do_action and apply_filters.

Custom Data

Adding custom data to a batch is pretty straightforward, here is a simple example:

/**
 * Prepare custom data to be sent from content stage to production.
 */
function my_custom_data( $batch ) {
	// Give your custom data a unique name.
	$name = 'my_custom_data';

	// Some data you want to add to the batch.
	$data = 'Hello World';

	// Add your custom data to the batch.
	$batch->add_custom_data( $name, $data );
}

// Hook in your custom data.
add_action( 'sme_prepare', 'my_custom_data' );

/**
 * Import custom data on production when batch is deployed.
 */
 function import_custom_data( $data ) {
 	// Do something with your custom data.
 }

 // Notice how we add the name of your custom data to the import hook.
 add_action( 'sme_import_my_custom_data', 'import_custom_data' );

Messages and Deploy Status

During pre-flight you might want to pass messages from the production environment back to content stage so they can be displayed to the user. Doing so is quite easy, here's an example for you:

/**
 * Made up function, this could be whatever.
 */
function my_custom_image_data( $batch ) {

	/**
     * @var Common_API $sme_content_staging_api
     */
     global $sme_content_staging_api;

	// Add a message to the batch.
	$sme_content_staging_api->add_preflight_message( $batch->get_id(), 'This rocks!', 'success' );
}

// Here we use a hook that is triggered in the end of the pre-flight (on production).
add_action( 'sme_verified', 'my_custom_image_data' );

The same thing is possible when deploying content. In addition you can also fail a batch deploy:

/**
 * Made up function, this could be whatever.
 */
function my_custom_image_data( $batch ) {

    /**
     * @var Common_API $sme_content_staging_api
     */
     global $sme_content_staging_api;

	// Add a message to the batch.
	$sme_content_staging_api->add_deploy_message( $batch->get_id(), 'Oh no, something went wrong!', 'error' );

	// Mark batch as failed (2 = Fail).
	$sme_content_staging_api->set_deploy_status( $batch->get_id(), 2 );
}

// This time we use a hook that is triggered in the end of the deploy process (on production).
add_action( 'sme_imported', 'my_custom_image_data' );