Wordpress pages and version control

Question

We are a software development company and are using Wordpress for static portion of the web site. Naturally, all our workflow is built around version control: multiple developers -> continious integration -> staging -> deployment.

Our challenge with integrating Wordpress into our workflow is that its database is stuck like a bone in the throat: you cannot put it into the version control, easily roll back, promote from staging to production etc.

I am wondering what people do in similar situations? I would like to find a way to integrate WP into the development workflow and not the other way around :-)

Clarification we want to "develop" and test pages on the staging system and when ready then move them over to the production as part of the version upgrade process. We don't want to do full replication of the staging database to production.

Answer 1

That's a common question and one that I've worked on tackling. I've written some code to address these issues albeit the code's not ready for distribution. Basically the idea is to create scripts to import the content and then version control the scripts. (Actually my approach uses a custom import/export format designed to be easy to hand-modify, but the idea is similar.)

Anyway, there are some related questions over on StackOverflow's sister site WordPress Answers:

• Questions tagged with the term [staging]
• Questions tagged with the term [deploy]

UPDATE

Per the clarification, this would probably be helpful too:

• Is there any way to draft a revision of a published page or post? What workarounds have you used?

Hope this helps.

-Mike