Improve staging for WooCommerce sites
Hi..
I love Cloudways UI..
And one of the things I found very handy was the staging functionality you offer (+ the recently added option to select tables).
Nevertheless, I have to say that I tried 2-3 times to create a staging site for a Woocommerce project ..and all of them I failed to successfully push changes back to the live site, without messing up the purchases/orders IDs.
During a 2 week staging period for testing and upgrading ..the live site had new sales and Orders (and incremental ID order) which I had to maintain.
The database tables to exclude (or include) to successfully import/export orders for WooCommerce are so vaguely stated ...that it turned out to be a nightmare pushing changes made on the staging site back to the live site, while keeping the Orders and their IDs the same.
The reason is that test Orders made on staging site, change the incremental ID stepping on the database - if I communicate this correct - so order 'John Doe ID #11' on live site before pushing changes, becomes 'John Doe ID #15' on the live site after pushing changes + importing orders (using XML import/export plugin).
in short, the only solution I can see to do this properly would be to know exactly which tables (related to WooCommeerce orders) to exclude when pushing changes back to live.
It would make it even more a breeze to magically have an optional filter available when pushing changes through CW panel - to push changes without affecting the related WooCommerce tables.
So, either by documenting it better or by adding a magic button ..would provide a better experience for your e-commerce customers.
Since you are always making Cloudways better by providing solutions to your end-users ..this could be another area that has space for improvement – for an improved e-commerce hosting experience.