Which comes first - local or remote?

I've been through the book (excellent, by the way), and tinkered which what feels like everything. :) I'm ready to start the process of building what will become my production store. I've read many options, and toyed with many. I can use a local copy, remote production site, a remote test site if needed. Originally I was going to have only the remote production and remote test, but after a lot of reading in this forum, I think I need the local test site.

So, where do I create my store initially? Should I build it on the remote site, and then copy to my local test site (pc)? Or start on my local PC and then copy to production?

I like the idea of starting local because the response time is faster and I think I can get it built quicker. But I thought I read somewhere that it is a bit of a pain to create your production site from the test site.

I've read all the FAQ's on how to copy to a new site, etc. But I haven't really found anything that recommends a process - where to start.

So, for those of you who are happy with your approach:

• where did you build your initial site?
• do you have three sites (local, remote production, remote QA)
• would you like to share your initial setup process, and your ongoing process for keeping all in sync?

You build locally and then upload the tested result to remote.

You then make changes locally and upload the changed files once tested to remote.

At Kuroi we have a three/four stage development cycle. This suits a professional development environment, but would be overkill for most owner-maintained sites. However, I'm happy to share it and hope that it proves useful.

We have a copy of of each client site sitting in an SVN repository. This allows it to be checked out to any (or typically several) of our development machines. Most users would simply keep a copy of their local machines.

When we make a change it automatically updates a local test server (one of two dedicated servers we have onsite). Most users would simply use something like XAMPP on their local machine.

When we are happy with changes locally, we upload them to a public staging server hosted by one of the Zen Cart certified hosts, where our customers can see and test the results. Most users won't need a staging server as they will have tested themselves locally.

When the client approves the changes (or where they are minor and we have prior agreement to deploy based on our own testing), we upload the changes to the live site, often within the client's own hosting account.

Because we always follow this route, the environments stay in sync, though our development environment (Aptana) allows us to check this from time-to-time to be sure.

Hope this helps.

I always prefer to build locally then upload over the new site..

It's easy enough to update a remote database with data taken from a local server, such as product data etc.
You just have to upload the images by FTP for any products you copy over.

What do you use to identify changed files that need to be ftp'd the remote server? I assume there is software to do this, and I don't have to manually keep a list.

I use CuteFTP - maybe it will do this, reliably?

I can't speak for CuteFTP. I don't use it. But there's a whole heap of possibilities depending upon the tools you're using.

Sometimes, for example when we're creating a mod, we work only with the files that we're changing, so there's no issue about which ones to upload.

When we work with a whole site, Aptana allows us to create working sets which highlight those files that we are working with amongst the much greater number that we're not. We can even export those files as a group to segregate them from everything else.

Aptana also allows us to do a trial sync between local and remote systems, which highlights the differences between them.

In addition, our svn records show which files were included in each change.

If you're not using a fully integrated development environment (IDE), and most Zen Cart users probably aren't, there are other options.

You can use WinMerge with WinSCP to compare local and remote files with the added benefit of more security than a normal comparison over FTP. I believe that the paid-for but cheap Beyond Compare will also allow remote comparisons out of the box.

Failing that, I always try to keep each change as small as possible, as it's much easier to find bugs if you change one thing at a time. And under these circumstances paper and pencil is often enough and quickest.

pharry:

What do you use to identify changed files that need to be ftp'd the remote server? I assume there is software to do this, and I don't have to manually keep a list.

I use CuteFTP - maybe it will do this, reliably?

Seeing as the majority of changes made to Zen are template, or stylesheet related mods, I normally FTP and overwrite the entire template folder on the remote server if/when there's been a substantial amount of work done. Else I do other FTP updates by checking filedate & time manually on the local development server with those on the remote server.

I'm not sure I'd entirely trust an FTP application to automatically 'syncronise' files on the local machine with the remote server..