We are trying to deploy our blogs with the same methodology that we've been using for our sites - a staged deployment process, where

1) Developers/Creatives may work on the blog site inside Visual Studio making tweaks as needed, and check in to our SVN repository.

2) We first publish to a staging server (from SVN/CI) where users can verify it all works as needed, and use the blog admin there to do certain configuration, etc.

3) We then publish to a production server, by copying from the staging server.


We are really tripping up because we have "data" in three places and we are having trouble getting the process right. Meaning, we can't just "wipe and re-publish from SVN" since so much is stored locally after deployment, from the blog posts themselves to some other visual settings. We also don't want to force people to re-do work that they have done on staging once the blog gets pushed "live" since that introduces a time-lag for inconsistency and leaves much room for human error.

Are there any established best practices around this? Even changing it so that the blogs are stored in the database didn't solve it all for us, because so much else is stored locally. We are almost at the point where simply copying app_data from place to place is the answer. Is there another answer?

Travis