A canonical three phase workflow

For every Production Site, deevop generates three phases: Develop, Demo and Production

These phases are completely independent from each other and are conveniently coloured so that you know at every moment where you are.

Each one has its own subdomain, too:

• Develop dev.domain.tld
• Demo demo.domain.tld
• Production (www).domain.tld

The Demo and Production environments are identical and run in your current website hosting, so you can be completely sure that what works on Demo, will work on Production, before going live.

Develop

Here is where the actual work is done. This is a password protected environment that nobody can access except the members of your team. It is excluded from search engines, too (in case you remove the password and link to it from somewhere else).

Demo

This phase is also password protected but with a different one intended for the client.

This phase has 3 purposes:

• To show progress to your client, whilst continuing to work privately on the Develop environment
• To test how the website behaves in the live server without making it live (php compatibilities, etc)
• To fine tun- the site for speed and performance (minimize JS/CSS, activate caching, etc)

Production

This is the live environment, the public version of your site. Once your site is live, you can work with it in many different ways.

• The client can add/modify content directly over the production version
• For minor adjustments it is not necessary to go over the whole cycle again, so you can do some tweaks here, too
• For bigger or uncertain changes, like updating or migrating a version (with extensions), we recommend dumping back the latest version of the live site over to the Develop environment. That way you can be sure that whatever happens to the site, it will be done in a safe/non-public environment

In order to avoid inconsistencies or overwriting data whilst updating/upgrading/modifying your website in the Develop environment, please check the possible workflows and sync strategies: