cPanel and Fantastico really are as simple as you say.
Thanks for making it possible for me to make a start with Wordpress.

Sorry – you’ve answered my question in one of your replies above (Simple Scripts) but I’ll send this just to congratulate you on a great series of articles.

Keep up the good work

Keith D

The exception to this is if you are activating new WordPress plugins, in that case I don’t know of a way to activate them programmatically (there may be a way) so you would need to use the Admin UI to activate them.

But all the CSS, PHP, HTML and other theme changes you could copy over directly. Always backup your files and database on the production instance before making these changes of course. WP-Backup is a nice plugin to make the database backups super easy.

I appreciate your quick reply. I have a follow up question.

Q: For the second option that you suggested, about creating two WordPress instances. What is the best way to move development changes over to the live environment? Can this be done without navigating through the WordPress GUI?

thanks,
Michael

Well, WordPress may not be as full featured as the corporate CMS that you are used to, but here are two multiple-user models that I’ve seen work well:

1) For content, WordPress has user roles. You can set up people in the “contributor” role which allows them to create new posts that can be previewed, but they need to be approved by an “editor” before the go live on the site for public view.

2) For development, set up two WordPress instances, one may be local, or on a different server or directory. Make the development changes in one and test before moving into the production environment.

I hope I’ve answered your question!

Great info! I have a question for you.

Back Story: I’ve worked on company websites in the past in a corporate team environment, where multiple engineers and developers were updating the site simultaneously and checking in their work into our CVS system (thus entering our code into a staging area). However, checking in code changes didn’t result in the changes appearing on the live site until the changes were reviewed by our testing team.

Q: What does WordPress provide that allows: 1) Changes to be made, 2) Reviewing the changes as a whole, then 3) Publishing the changes to the LIVE site for the public to see all at once?

thanks,
Michael

I use Fantastico all the time to set up WordPress installations and have not experienced any problems. BlueHost is now recommending that you use Simple Scripts for WordPress installs. You’ll see the icon for it in the same section as the Fantastico icon. I’m using that now and it is even faster.

BlueHost is good about publishing new WordPress upgrades – they will show up as an option in your Simple Scripts area, making version upgrades easy.

Let me know if this doesn’t answer your question.