To test a site on a staging server:
- Setup your staging server
- Configure the staging server.
- Create triggers for any custom tables.
- Configure your database for staging.
- If you set up your production and staging servers at the same time, skip this step. If your production server is already running, it contains data that must be copied to the staging server.
- Test the site
- Run the Stage Check utility to ensure there is no unique index key conflict.
- Propagate data to the production database.
- Copy the files to the production server.
- Manually propagate any database schema changes from the staging database to the production database.
- Delete staged objects from the STAGLOG table.
Repeat steps 2-8 each time changes are made to the files or database data on the staging server. These steps can be automated in a script and scheduled to run at off-peak hours to minimize performance impacts to the production server.