Best strategy for product data changes in production

Question

I've been looking at ways to incorporate product data changes (creation, updation, deletion) into a production environment other than performing them through the admin interface. Couldn't find any resources that talked about these in particular.

I'm using a git & modman based workflow for extensions. I have a module that configures the store(admin settings, store information, themes etc.) through setup scripts. Data setup scripts are an option. But, I'm not sure of the memory implications when loading hundreds of products through a data setup script.

I can think of the following options (I might be missing some):

• Use a custom script / dataflow profile for initial bulk product data import (when setting up the store) and data setup scripts for later additions/modifications
• Use data setup scripts for both initial bulk product import and subsequent creations/modifications
• Use the excellent Aoe_Import module by AOEpeople for intial bulk product data import and data setups scripts thereafter

What is the best practice for pushing data to production environment for a large single shop (not a magento hosting scenario where each client would want more flexibility over their data) ?

Answer 1

In my opinion the best solution will be a staging system. We installed such a system for some of our customers, because the new product catalog is very huge and it takes several hours to import.

After that we

1. Go to maintenance mode
2. Dump all relevant product tables with a script
3. Delete the old tables in the production system
4. Leave maintenance mode

This has the following advantages:

• You can check the import result without any effect on the production system and reimport all data if something went wrong
• Just some minutes of downtime for the shop (you can do it late at night)
• You can dump the index tables, too (no reindex in production required)
• ...

The technical modification of product data should be done with AvS_FastSimpleImport. This solution is very fast and easy to use.

Hope this helps!