Hikashop staging and backup

Hi there:

I have a localhost Joomla staging server, where I do all my web development, and then I use Akeeba Backup to copy the entire localhost website over to my Internet-hosted live site. But once I open my Hikashop-based online store to customers, and those customers place orders, I will start to accumulate Hikashop date on my Internet site that does not exist on my localhost staging server. If I do my normal localhost-to-production copy I will overwrite my Hikashop order and customer data.

So my questions are:

• Does Hikashop store all its order- and customer-related data in the database?
• Is any file-based data created? Like invoices? If so, where are they stored?
• Any suggestions for a workflow to provide localhost-to-production staging, without overriding Hikashop data accumulated on the live site? I am assuming this is a common scenario, and that most Hikashop site owners are not directly editing their live sites?

Regards,

Martin

Hi,

Everything is stored in the database.

You should first do the update on your staging website. Then, fix any issue you can see and note what you did. If you have to add CSS/view overrides, you can then port them to the live website and then do the update on the live website.
During the update, new columns and tables are added to the database so you can't just copy the tables around from one website to the other if they don't have the same version. So that's why in the end you need to do the update on the live website.

Hi Nicolas:

So are you saying I have to manually repeat my updates on the production site? Do them first on my local site, then repeat them manually on the live site?

Regards,

Martin

Indeed. I believe that everyone is doing it like that for big (in the sense of lot of tables in the database which have to be updated for each release) Joomla extension updates.

Sorry, Nicolas, I'm not specifically talking about extension updates (although this does apply). I'm talking about the day-to-day creation and editing of articles, configuration of extensions, modification to menus, etc. I find it hard to believe that people are doing this on live sites, rather than on staging servers, followed by some mechanism to automatically push changes from the staging server to the production server.

Regards,

Martin

Hi Martin,

Indeed the process may be quite heavy to support everyday, however if a solution exists, it's not provided by Hikashop.
As Nicolas said you'll probably have to make your modification twice. But some tools may make your life easier like the product import and export which will allow you to update your products quite quickly.
The problem still remain for css and code customization as well as for database modifications.