Thank you. Hello, everyone. My name is Andre Ašenco. I originally come from Hungary I've been living in Switzerland Geneva for the past nine years or so I'm a full-time father. I have two real daughters at home I'm a WordPress enthusiast been working with it for ten years When I work I do customer support work for the events calendar and all its additional plugins I Do some web design some web development I have a bit less time for it now But I still try to do something on that and in my very spare free time. I'm running a blog on DB magazine You can guess that it's handles about the DB theme, which is pretty popular My talk is inspired by my work as I said I'm doing customer support work at modern tribe for the events calendar for our plugins We put out a new release and update every three weeks with these updates usually Publish a blog post saying what's coming in this update? What have we fixed? What are the new features and we also tell the users that hey before you do any updates? Create a backup of your site and if you can test The updates on a staging site just to make sure that everything works and that your website doesn't bring Well, what do the users do and they see that little blue icon on the top reading you updates like Got some new stuff for free Couple minutes later. They see a broken website and then they go to the support forums hours or whatever Whatever other plug in developer team developer and start cursing at you guys for my website And I want my money back and I need your help immediately and yesterday and fix this for you And that's when I go Like this So what is a staging site a Staging site this is the definition from Wikipedia Staging site is nothing else than an exact copy of your website where you can fool around You can do whatever you want and your visitors to your live website will not see it So it's basically a safe environment to test out different things This is a popular thing in Workpress sessions raise your hand. So please raise your hand if you have a website or manage a website that runs on WordPress Okay, almost all Raise your hand if you have any plug-in or theme installed on your website. So you are all affected by this Now I'm going to hi. Okay. Why not? So why aren't people using the staging sites? Even though we always recommend it. I was trying to come up with ideas. Why and this is what I came up with They think it takes a lot of time or It's super close because they have a backup or they don't know how to create a website Or are they just simply like the adrenaline rush like let's see if I create something You have or they haven't thought about it. Thank you very much. Any other ideas why some people don't have a Synchronizing the data back to the life side the data Okay, anything else Costs too much money to run two websites Sorry I think they better they once less followers like the Facebook so they have our audience Okay, so In this presentation actually I'm gonna hide now behind my computer screen and walk you through a demonstration How you can set up a staging site and got to show you how actually easy it is and it doesn't take too much time I'm gonna keep talking and hopefully you'll keep hearing me even though I'm high These are the plugins that we are going to be using Work as backup plug-in I chose back up the back WP up you can use basically any backup plug-in That's out there free or premium We're gonna use WP staging for creating a staging site. We're gonna use only in one WP migration for doing a migration In the second phase and the last one is not a plug-in. It's a software for your computer Which is a local by flywheel, which basically a software for giving you a local server environment where you can install a website and on your computer without Putting it live anywhere on the internet So let's start the demonstration I have created a nice website for this occasion Put there some blog posts. Let's pretend that this is my regular blog and I do blogging here and I want to create a Staging site of this one. What is the first thing that I need to do before I do anything? any guesses backup very good, so I have my plugins here. I'm just Already installed them so we don't waste time with that here. I activate the backup plug-in I need to find it Here and we First with this we need to create a job What the backup will contain you can do all the settings. I'm not going to bore you with that at the moment All backup plug-ins are slightly different. So basically I just click on this my First backup template. I'm just gonna run this so that we have a backup of the website Depending on the size of your website the number of plugins you use the number of Media you have in your media library the time of this will depend from couple minutes up to maybe half an hour Since this is not a too big of a website. It should finish pretty fast Once the backup is done. I strongly recommend that you download it and keep it somewhere safe Don't leave it on the same server as your website is Because if something happens to that server you are so the backup has been done and I can go up to the backups here And download it to my computer Where I think it will be safe, right? So now it's now I can start working on the staging site activating WP staging for that and This is the screen that you're wicked with You see one nice button here Create new staging site So let's do that What are we going to name it? I'm just going to name it stage For the sake of these if you want to go deeper you can select which database tables you want to replicate Which files do you want to replicate or not? I leave the default settings and I start calling It will take me through the Through the regular steps and if we're lucky then in a couple minutes, hopefully or less, we will have a staging site Now here you see the address of the website is and as the sale comm The name I gave to the staging site was staging so it should create a staging site on and as the sale comm slash staging and It should look exactly the same as the live website until we wait I just would like to sign and say thank you for outposting They are hosting my website, and I'm pretty much satisfied Yes, of course This is how this plugin works it it makes it easy It will show as a sub directory, but from the main side you will not Basically reach it. There will be no link put on your live website You will need to enter in the address bar the slash staging yourself You can log into the administrative interface of that. I will show you that in The staging database will be used The new one yes, so I'm going to this is my still the original site I'm just refreshing nothing has changed there Here it's a congratulations Open staging site, so we're gonna do that. I need to log in here and there we go You can see in the address bar that we're already on staging in the admin interface What this plug-in does nicely is they color the top bar to orange so that you see that is not your life side Is your staging side you're working? If we visited on the front You can see it looks exactly the same now just for the fun of it. I'm going to make a modification To I'm just gonna edit this post and change the title Okay, so we did the modification. This is the staging site I refresh Done. This is my live site No changes there So basically on the staging side you can do any kind of modification you can deactivate plugins Put there a new theme do development check how it looks like if a plug-in update comes out Do it on your staging site first update it check how the staging site looks if it looks good Your you know that you're kind of safe you can update the plugin on the life side as well So this is a how you do a live staging site if you're down with it if you don't need it anymore It's pretty easy to delete you just go back to your live site from where you created it and Go to WP staging here you will see a list of your staging sites I only have one and I just click on delete Yes, I want to totally remove it From here is gone. Let me check the admin. Oh It's not there anymore. Let me check front-end That's also gone. Let me check the live site Still there and working So this was what about five minutes In five minutes we created a staging site live an exact copy of our website We could do changes there can do any modifications And once you're done you can and you don't need it anymore You can just remove it you can repeat this as many times as you want You can do it every two weeks or you can just leave your staging site there and keep it running and keep testing on the same one he wants Yes There are options for that as well I haven't found any free options in that but this WP staging plug-in has a premium version Which will allow you to do that. So basically you do the changes on your staging site And with a click of a button all those changes will be put back to your live site And then you don't need to do again be updated separate And then can you re-opt a changing site from the light so you can make changes on your live site Rather than creating a whole new staging site, can you just update your staging site to me? Yes, with the premium versions it usually is possible to synchronize the live site and the staging site back and forth Personally, I'm using for backup the premium plug-in from iThemes for the backup body which has a staging site features and I regularly pull the live site to the staging site and then do the changes and push it back and it works really nice Usually in free plug-ins that option is not available because plug-in developers don't need to wear it so much So this was Our live version of the staging site create a backup and then create a staging site play around and then Now we're going to show you how to create a staging site on your computer So it's not out on the web. It gets on your computer and you can play around with it there For this we're going to use local by flywheel that software which sets you up with a server environment on your pc Again, we start with the backup. We did that previously Then for this we will need a database export with All-in-one WP migration So let me just quickly activate that here we go and we I don't want to export now everything I would just need the database Save it on my computer. So now I have a copy of the database in a file on my computer Now we go over to local by flywheel Here I already have a staging site set up But if you want to set up a new site, basically this will set you up with a black WordPress installation as if you just installed WordPress out of the box Just click on the plus go through the settings give it a name And it sets you up with a site like this one I'm not going to do that due to lack of time now, but it's pretty straightforward I'm going to start this website starting the server And let's view the site As usual in these couple seconds So here's the black WordPress installation. This is what you get out of the box Now next step Oh, yeah, we did this one Now we copy the WP contents folder from the backup Here you go So on the left side, this is where my staging site is installed I navigate to the root folder of it I look for the file that I just backed up Previously which contains the files and my WP contents folder I just drag it over here 4,000 items. I'm not sure why Oh, I didn't have that much in there Okay, so basically this copies all my plugins, my themes and all the uploads from my live site To this new WordPress installation that doesn't have anything yet Unfortunately, we cannot continue until that is done So we're going to wait a couple seconds. I'm sorry about that being about any questions. Feel free With those plugins that you've just shown for creating the staging site Do they have options for staging it to another server? Or are they focused on just working on the same? The WP staging is On the same server in the same installation folder I'm not sure if the pro version allows you to Push it to a different server. I believe it might be an option and the one that you use yourself Anywhere But which one do you use? I use backup buddy Yes This solution to create the staging will basically clone it on the same server. What if you don't have space for that? Do you have any solutions for creating staging? Automatically outside of no Automatically outside With the pro version of that plugin you you possibly do yes And without our own servers Sorry on they are no on whatever server you can you can Or with the plugin I use with backup buddy you can do whatever You need to set up the site And then pull all the live content from your live site over Or might wave it over to the other server and then you can work with it You can establish a connection between the two and sync up and down afterwards the way you want So we have copied the content folder now. We need to import the database Here so if we go to plugins we already see Everything because we just copied them. We will need Sorry the migration plugin this time migration and we need to import Just going to pull the file over here This one Imports the database from the live site Yes, I want to override everything The import has been done now. I need to save the permalink settings I'm not sure why I need to log in again Because now it has the Username and the password from the live site already Yes So here we're saving the permalinks twice as instructed Do you know why twice is this twice? Uh I think just to make sure I am not sure why the you must save your perm instructor twice, okay Mind work with one make just to be sure to save it twice If I look at the plugins. Thank you You see that before nothing was activated now already everything is that was on the live site and let's check the front end Here you're on the local web server on the local site and all the content is there you can start playing around Changing stuff and your live website will not be affected at all So this is how you can set up a staging site on a live server on your local server play around with it Test out whatever you need and once you feel safe that all the updates work well Then do it on your live website. This will save you lots of hours Of frustration In case your website would go Wrong And basically this is the end of the demonstration If you have any more questions, um, happy to answer them for you Now or in the coffee break or So it's a very good it was a very good presentation to see how you can do it without being Technically minded. It's a process that I use at work is yeah extremely complicated and that looks a lot easier Um, just talking about local local by flywheel. That's not I've heard about it. I've never tried it out Is that have you compared that with vagrants? So run a lot I have never used vagrants. You've never okay. I started using local by flywheel But four months ago Before that I was using xm who might be familiar with that that requires a bit more tweaking and manual setup and whatnot Local by flywheel is super easy to use and I Rarely had any issues So you can put the word press into the local by flywheel Yes, the local by flywheel is give you gives you a sobering environment for word press basically So, uh, if we still have Two minutes two minutes. Yes local by flywheel. Once we install you will not see these two here It will be blank. This is how you had a new website. Just click on the plus Leave it a name stick with the defaults. Give a username at site adding Sometimes it needs to download some small stuff from the internet Uh, but basically this runs in half a minute maybe one minute and then your word press installation is there and ready There the new is ready. We see the green If if you don't see then you need to start the website here with the button Let's view the site New.local and I have a new word press site up This was one and a half minutes, maybe I haven't seen any faster way of setting up the word press website locally or remotely Yes Films like the defaults theme to be put up. No, it will always install one of the current defaults theme word presses currently is 2017 Uh, I believe uh, let's quickly check. We are here in the back and appearance I think it does it does give you 2015 2016 as well As someone who has broken several word press websites by running Look in potatoes Sites and when you use the wp staging method Is it really a separate instance of word press? Yes So because sometimes the the breaking of the site You break the actual word press install in fact depending on what lines you have broken it Don't create a staging site from that That I know what I'm saying is there's really no risk if you're working on that wp staging site Okay, besides something that might affect the server itself. There's another question But in terms of things that you can do to word press It's totally it basically Basically creates a separate word press installation in a soft folder So it's totally separate and it creates new database tables for the word press installation So the tables are also separate and the folder is also separate It's basically disconnected from your website from where your life the tables are in the same They are in the same database, but they are they have a different prefix That can be fewer. I think I'm sorry that can be Several possibilities but you have to have to separate the table one set. Yeah How it works that I think there will be different solutions You can read today to the database tables that can be databases or different tables There are different kind of solutions and with other plugins You will have different options This plugin specifically does it on the same Server because a lot of users Don't have technical knowledge don't know about hosting creating some folders in the server And this gives you a one click solution The word presence wouldn't have the permissions to create any database for example, so it would create tables in the same database Okay, last last question How do you push life? Is there a very easy way to push the When you have the premium version of wp staging From flywheel From flywheel if you want to push live from flywheel with this free version That's not possible But if you purchase hosting at flywheel Then you connect your flywheel hosting with the local by flywheel and then you can basically with the push of the button Push your website. Thank you very much