Migrating forms between different Elgg environments

I was wondering how to migrate changes to existing forms/new forms between different environments e.g. dev->QA->prod?

As I understand Elgg does not really support this kind of development/migration model (due to the fact that all metadata is kept in the same underlying db tables as ordinary data and all relevant keys/IDs are autogenerated) and so it is impossible to "isolate" a specific change, instead one has to manually "redo" the change in production environment (after it proved to be working fine in dev/QA).

Am I right?

Thanks,

Kris

  • Yes, you are right.

    None of my clients have yet funded a form export/import function. You might get OpenDD to work, but I've never tried it.

    You could try migrating the whole database, however. It might not be hard to do. See:

    http://docs.elgg.org/wiki/DuplicateInstallation

  • Thanks Kevin. Yes, migration of the whole database is good "for a start".

    But later, for any incremental changes, export/import kind of function would be ideal.

    And I guess this is true not only for Forms plugin but for a few other plugins out there that store their metadata inside the database. Curverider folks could possibly think of adding a generic functionality of this type to Elgg (though I'm not sure if the 'issue' is generic enough so that a generic function can be created...).

    I have not tried OpenDD, I'll check it out later.

    Thanks.

Form and related plugins

Form and related plugins

User-generated content, flexible user and group profiles, registration forms, custom file forms