I’m very excited to introduce RAMP to the WordPress community. RAMP is a new commercial product for WordPress that makes it easy to set up your content in your staging environment, then push those changes to your live site.
At Crowd Favorite we are fortunate to have some really great clients. These clients are running some pretty big web properties on WordPress, and they need to stage their content, review it internally, revise it, etc. before they put it live. It’s a pretty universal need – we just did it on our own site as we were preparing the web page and documentation for RAMP on our own site. This has always been difficult with WordPress, and had often resulted in SQL export/import followed by update scripts and/or manual copy-paste steps. RAMP solves this problem elegantly. You simply:
- Install the RAMP plugin on your staging and production servers, and enter the auth key and URL from production in the settings for your staging server.
- Select the changes you’d like to send and save them as a batch.
- RAMP the batch up to your production server.
RAMP doesn’t just support posts and pages either; it fully supports custom post types, categories, tags, custom taxonomies, users, menus, links and more.
We’re really proud of the underlying architecture of RAMP. We spent a long time working out just the right way to implement this type of functionality for WordPress, and I’m really pleased with the solution. We utilize core WordPress functionality and APIs, the XMLRPC layer for transport between servers, and built everything on top of an wonderfully extensible system (which uses the core WordPress hook and filter system) to allow any WordPress content to participate in a RAMP batch. We’ve already done this to Carrington Build.
RAMP is a commercial product priced at available in the Crowd Favorite store. Your purchase includes documentation and support in our customer forum.
This post is part of the project: RAMP. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
This post is part of the project: RAMP. View the project timeline for more context on this post.
Congrats on shipping RAMP Alex.
I’ve been crying out for something like this for a long time and I posted on it only a month ago – http://themesforge.c[...]ent-options/
Really looking forward to trying this out at some stage. What kind of stress tests have you run on RAMP – I have several sites with a couple of thousand pages/posts/custom posts that this might be suitable for in the future.
Ed
We did our entire Intranet site (~4 years worth of content). We did have to increase the PHP memory limit to get the initial content selection done, but it all worked. ๐
cool that’s good to know – thanks Alex.
What a great idea Alex. I don’t personally work with websites that are big enough to need this functionality, but now that you explain why, I can see how this will come in handy for larger businesses.
/Maria
Alex — congrats on the release. I’ve been building the technical requirements for a similar plugin for a client using, ahem, another CMS. It can become an incredibly complex problem. I look forward to recommending this to all my friends using WP.
It was definitely a bigger project than we originally scoped. Lots of little edge cases – we’ve been working on it for quite a while.
Happy to talk you through our approaches if you want to buy lunch. ๐
Is it compatible with Network installations?
Are new plugin installations and updates pushed as well?
Assuming you’re referring to WordPress multi-site installation, yes. Each live site instance can have a matching staging site and use RAMP.
I invite you to read the details on the product page. RAMP handles content changes and will identify plugin differences, but it does not push code changes (there are already great tools for pushing code changes, we recommend SVN, Git, Mercurial, etc.).
Nice name. ๐ Just wanted to let you know that “ramp” means “disaster” in Dutch. ๐
Looks great! We may have to try this out with a few projects here at MIT.
Nice to see the video done in Lion. You must have been busy yesterday. ๐
Congrats on the launch! Likewise with commenters above — looks great & I’d like to use it myself. ๐
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RAMP: Easy Content Deployment for WordPress : alexking.org: http://t.co/CevDEMF
This could solve a lot of problems for us. A lot.
One question: our security requirements demand that the /wp-admin directory be absent from our production environment. Will that be a hindrance to RAMP?
/wp-admin would definitely need to be present for the initial set-up – I know we’ve never tested that kind of environment. There is a lot of code in /wp-admin, so I think it’s likely something in there might be needed for various data saving operations.
[…] For a little more detail about just what this product is all about, check out my original post announcing RAMP. […]
Easy staging/production WordPress management with RAMP plugin http://t.co/8cDnqluF
This looks really good, can’t wait to try it out
How does this work with custom post types??
Works great with custom post types, taxonomies, etc. (as listed on the product page).