Managing a large CMS or web development installation requires at least a few different conceptual environments. Depending on individual needs, there may be variations on Development, Staging/Test, and Live (Production). Typically, these environments should be distinct and separate from each other, connected by a central source control system through which all updates happen. Making changes by hand will inevitably foul an environment and let it drift out of sync with the master repository.

Running a multi-developer environment is complicated, and there are a large number of concurrency issues to be dealt with. This is a sample CMS environment to support a few developers with three formal environments, in the case where changes are only made on code in files. It only gets more complex from here.

Next, you might want to add support for automated database schema updates, or more different environments. This also doesn’t say anything about testing environments for content editing - this is development only. I’ll cover content editing workflows in a future post.