oik-clone - Syndicate content to multiple sites

oik-plugins is being hosted by a number of different hosting companies.

We’re performing some performance analysis to find the best hosting solution taking into account: performance, value for money, ease of use, etc..

We want to compare apples with apples.

Whenever we make a change that improves performance we want to be able to test the same change on the other sites
Each site should have exactly the same content structure
We want to automate the synchronization process as much as possible

There are 4 sites in the performance analysis:

The last three are complete clones of the first site, created from MySQL export files.

Our experience with managing content on multiple sites has indicated a need for automating the creation and maintenance of content.

We want to be able to syndicate the content to multiple sites.

The method we want to use to keep the content synchronized for each performance test involves two other sites:

Here we use the term node to refer to a single item of content. A node can be of any post type.

There are multiple post types and taxonomies
There are many hundreds of nodes
The content contains complex relationships between nodes. This information is stored formally and informally;
- formally – post meta data in fields holding post ID(s), post parent, featured image
- informally – in free form in the post content, excerpts and other post meta fields
Content may be created in any sequence then modified such that the complex relationships between nodes appear to create cyclical dependencies
Not all post types should be cloned
Not all post meta data should be cloned
Some nodes are created semi-automatically

The proposed solution is to develop oik-clone to satisfy the proposed method and the content requirements.

Many of the Technical requirements for oik-clone link directly to the proposed method for keeping the changes synchronized
oik-clone v0.7 is the minimum version required to clone the content and its overall structure
oik-clone v0.8 is the minimum version required to clone the informal relationships and to ensure matching results for front-end queries
Additional requirements will be raised based on our experience of using the solution
These may include non-functional requirements and nice-to-haves

It is not possible to satisfy the Proposed method with the current solution
Forward cloning creates significant challenges in determining the correct target ID
Therefore the cloning has to be driven from a single source

Note that oik-plugins.net has not yet been created.

Furthermore, it’s not particularly practical. It’s much easier to follow this process.