Thread: Confused about Staging

Cannot fiind any info in the manual or forum about what is the difference between the staging and production, as far as what is visible on the web.

Staging site is also a part of the development in which your site is still under testing. This stage usually tests test transactions which your site is either on a live mode or not. This is also the stage where you install your SSL and check if this is working fine on your site without any issues.

Production site is where you have your site on production stage, where real customers now are placing their orders and real transactions happen on this stage.

Hope this helps

I understand what they are used for (mostly), what I am wondering about is if there is any difference on the public side.

From what I gather, they are basically two different sites, the staging which may or may not be hidden or blocked from public access?

Yes, typically in a development environment your "staging" would be invisible to the outside world. In a larger environment, your staging would not even be accessible outside of your firewall. In a real world situation for small business your staging is simply another install on a separate server which does not get indexed.

Got it, thanks. Sounds like we don't really need the development server, just staging.

Your development "server" is really our local machine. Its what you use day to day to test and make changes without interrupting testing (staging) or sales (production). Once you have stable code/xmlpackage changes you would move them to staging, test more, then move them to production.

Correct. Staging is generally where the devs send the code so the managers and QA folks can have a look at it. A staging site is not always appropriate in very small deployments.