Do you have paper beside your keyboard right now with a list of changes you need to make in the WordPress dashboard right after deploying your site to production? You wouldn’t be the first. This is what responsible developers have been doing since the very first sites were built on WordPress.
What if you forget to write down a change? Or when deploying you accidentally skip an item? A little mistake could be costly. And you’ll probably be performing the deployment at an ungodly hour, feverishly comparing the data on your dev site to your live site, and rushing to get the site back online. Pressure is high and you’re tired and stressed out. There’s a good chance you’ll make that costly mistake.
Mergebot takes the stress out of WordPress database deployments and reduces the likelihood of human error to nearly zero.
From the team behind WP Migrate DB Pro
With the Mergebot plugin installed on your dev/staging site, changes that you make in the WordPress dashboard are saved to the Mergebot cloud app and ready to be deployed. At any time, you can refresh your dev/staging site with the latest production database and deploy the changes from the cloud app. When you’re ready to deploy to production, you do the same thing, deploy the changes from the cloud app.
Every time you refresh your dev/staging database and apply your saved changes from Mergebot, you’re also testing a deployment. You’re deploying your changes to the production database, it just happens to be a copy of it in your dev/staging environment. The more times you refresh your dev/staging database and apply changes from Mergebot, the more you test your final deployment. By the time you apply the changes to production, it should feel boring. You’ll have a newfound confidence in your deployments.
High traffic sites present another set of challenges and can make deployment extra stressful. Mergebot was designed with high traffic sites in mind. For example, monitoring all database changes on a high traffic site would be devastating to performance, bogging down the server, and increasing page load time. So Mergebot doesn’t monitor all changes to the production site. Instead, it only looks at data that has been modified in dev/staging to detect conflicts. And it only looks at that data at deploy-time, ensuring there is no measurable impact on performance.
Hit the record button in your WordPress Admin bar to start flagging changes for deployment. Make some changes. Hit the record button again to stop flagging changes. Forgot to hit the record button before making changes? No problem. Just visit the Mergebot app and check off the queries that should have been flagged.
When the same piece of data is changed in different environments, Mergebot will let you know about it. For example, let’s say you changed the title of a page in your dev/staging environment and someone also changed the title of that same page in production. The next time you refresh your dev/staging database and apply your changes from Mergebot you’ll be shown a conflict resolution screen and will be asked to choose which title you’d prefer to deploy. It will also save this resolution for the next time you refresh your database or when it comes time to deploy to the production site. You won’t ever have to resolve the same conflict twice.
Been banging your head against the wall trying to figure out how you’re going to deploy the database changes to a WooCommerce site you’ve been working on for the past six months without losing orders, customer reviews, etc? Yikes! Unfortunately, if you’re currently in this pickle, Mergebot can’t help you. But next time, when you start working on the site, you can set up Mergebot and have it save the changes you make to your dev site and deploy those changes without affecting orders, customer reviews, etc. #winning
The database of a membership site is constantly changing. New members are being added, current members are logging in, and activity is being tracked. To work on the site, you can’t just copy the database to dev/staging, make changes, and copy it back to production. Data would be lost. You need a solution that will merge your dev/staging changes into production. Whether you’re using Membermouse, Restrict Content Pro, S2Member, or another WordPress membership plugin, Mergebot is that solution.
With blogs, news sites, or any kind of publishing, new articles are regularly added to the live site and new comments are rolling in from visitors. If you have plugins installed, they’re likely collecting data as well. Meanwhile, you are doing some development on the site, adding new pages and posts, changing settings, configuring new plugins, updating widgets, etc. How do you deploy those development database changes without overwriting the data changes that have been happening on the live site? Mergebot.
Most plugins just work with Mergebot, while others need to be configured. We’ve preconfigured Mergebot for the most common WordPress plugins so you don’t have to. In the rare case that you’re using a plugin that needs configuration, you can add a schema.
Although you don’t need to use WP Migrate DB Pro, we have integrated it with Mergebot and the two work very well together. For example, Mergebot ignores any WP Migrate DB Pro queries, like saving settings and any temporary migration data. And when you pull your production database down and replace your dev/staging database, WP Migrate DB Pro will preserve your Mergebot settings. All Mergebot subscriptions include a WP Migrate DB Pro license (valid as long as your Mergebot subscription is active).
If you’ve written a custom plugin or theme that creates its own database tables, shortcodes, etc., you can tell Mergebot about it by defining a schema. Once Mergebot understands your custom data, it can handle any changes to it just like the rest.
Mergebot provides a very smooth and quick process for merging databases between development and production environments without losing any data.
Highly recommend @dliciousbrains Wordpress plugins, their customer support is excellent.
Have I mentioned how awesome the folks @dliciousbrains are? Well they are! <3
Every Mergebot plan comes with a WP Migrate DB Pro license included. Why? Because merging database changes is even easier when you can easily migrate your database between environments.
WP Migrate DB Pro is our solution for migrating databases that’s been helping our customers move databases with a click of a button for more than half a decade.
But you don’t just have to use it with Mergebot. Migrate from dev to production and back again anytime you want with or without Mergebot.
Wondering which WP Migrate DB Pro license comes with each Mergebot plan? The 1 Site Mergebot plan includes a WP Migrate DB Pro Personal license ($99 value) and all other plans include a WP Migrate DB Pro Developer license ($249 value).
If for any reason you are not happy with our product or service, simply let us know within 30 days of your purchase and we'll refund 100% of your money. No questions asked.
Unfortunately not. Mergebot is a tool in your development workflow and needs be installed and activated before you make changes to your development site. Your development site needs to be an exact copy of production before you start.
Mergebot plan limits are based on the number of sites you need to use Mergebot with at the same time. So even if you're currently responsible for 30 sites, but you're only working on at most 2 of those at the same time, the 3 site plan is more than enough for your needs. You can connect and disconnect sites from Mergebot as they move in and out of your merging workflow.
By "sites" we mean production site(s) that are being worked on at the same time. When you connect a production site to Mergebot it counts toward your site limit. Development and staging sites don't count toward your limit. At any time you can disconnect a site from Mergebot to free up your limit for another site.
You’ll receive software updates and support for as long as you're a Mergebot customer. On the anniversary of your purchase, your subscription will automatically renew giving you another year of software updates and support. If you purchase a monthly plan, your access to updates & support will renew each month.
The Mergebot WordPress plugin requires PHP 5.3+ and WordPress v4.0+.
For the most part yes, but you may need to configure Mergebot for some themes and plugins. Check out our Supported Plugins doc for more details.
Currently Mergebot will give you a list of media files that need to be manually uploaded and a list of files that need to be manually removed at deploy time. In the future Mergebot will simply handle this for you.
Not at the moment, but we do plan to support this in the near future.
Nope. To work on a new site, you have to disconnect the site that’s already connected and all data for that site will be deleted.
Communication between the plugin and app is securely encrypted over HTTPS. Site data stored by the app is not encrypted for performance reasons.
To remove your data from the Mergebot app simply login and disconnect any sites from the "Sites" dashboard. The process of disconnecting a site will remove any data stored in the app associated with that site.
Nope. It’s currently limited to one dev or staging environment and one production environment. We are working to support multiple environments.
Yes it does! We also support domain mapping in a network using the WordPress MU Domain Mapping plugin.
We have some great features planned that will only be possible if Mergebot is a cloud app. For example, we will be supporting multiple developers contributing changes to the same deployment.
Not sure if Mergebot is the right fit for you? Send us an email at hq@mergebot.com and we'll give you our no-BS opinion.