Make Staging and Dev environment real world friendly

[kLOsk]

I'm using WordMove quite extensively and found that one problem some clients complain about is the indexing of staging sites by google. At the moment I go by setting up .htaccess with a password, tho I'm not sure if this might cause any problems with the permalinks as it requires to add .htaccess to the ignore list in the Movefile. Any thoughts?

Another thing I'm noticing is that a lot of serial based activation plugins craze out when the content is pushed and pulled to different domains. How do you guys handle this, without reactivating licenses every two days...?

[dsgnr]

I personally have never had any issues with licenses. In regards to htaccess, just add it into your ignored files within the Wordmove file. that way you're not moving the file back and forth. I actually just have the default wordpress settings in my local htaccess file, unless I have a security plugin with rewrite rules.

[kLOsk]

Theres quite a few plugins that are tied to a domain. Which gets a bit annoying after a while, but I guess theres nothing you can do about those, however, some plugins are even more annoying and somehow phone home, disabling themselves when they are phoning from staging and production environment....

Regarding the htaccess, I believe a better solution would be a simple database mod on the settings table to activate no index mode. Would be nice if something like that could be added...

[alessandro-fazzi]

I can say a word about indexing: I'd use the wordpress option

and the robots.txt file. Eventually ignoring the file in MOvefile if you need to.

I know someone else uses http basic auth to password protect the access to staging environments.

[alessandro-fazzi]

Sry, no clues on getting such things better. I have to close this one :(