Syncing theme settings between multiple environments / websites

[baizmandesign]

Hi there,

Thanks for making the Ollie theme. It's quite a departure from the legacy themes—and mostly for good! As someone who is very familiar with the older-style WordPress themes, I'm having trouble creating a workflow between development, staging, and production environments. (This comment is similar to #128.) The documentation says that one can export and import the theme. The export is clearly documented: from the site editor, choose export and a ZIP file will be downloaded. My questions:

• For importing, does one just expand the ZIP archive and place the resulting folder in wp-content/themes on the other site (and then activate the theme if inactive)?
• My workflow necessitates making all changes on a local development environment and, once set, migrating those changes to a production environment. In the past, when I made changes to a theme, I used a plugin such as Customizer Export/Import. How can I replicate that workflow with Ollie?
• If I make changes on the production environment and need to copy them to the development environment, I would have again used the Customizer Export/Import plugin. How can I replicate that workflow with Ollie?

Thank you.

Saul

[mikemcalister]

Hey Saul,

Apologies for the late response here. We've been tied up getting Ollie Pro out the door. Now that we've got that launched, I'm swinging back around to fix up any loose ends in the theme.

Right now, the workflow for block themes is still a little hazy — everyone does it a little different. This is a good article Brian Coords wrote exploring different ways to do it.

You should also check out the Create Block Theme plugin, which has tooling to help develop and save block theme changes to disk. A lot of people are using that to get a solid local-to-live workflow. I think the only thing it doesn't do yet is save patterns, which seems like an odd omission, but that is in the works.

Personally, I still find plugins like WP Migrate very helpful for moving block theme sites because it can move files and database changes.

Once we find a good workflow for ourselves, we'll be sure to update the docs (and probably even create a video) so folks can see what's possible.

[baizmandesign]

@mikemcalister Thanks so much for your response; I deeply appreciate it. (And congratulations on the launch of Ollie Pro! I can't wait to dig into it.)

Until there's a clear workflow for clean, two-way synchronization between development and production sites, I may have to reconsider using an FSE block theme for client sites. But I am very eager to embrace the new FSE world!