How do I learn how to create/deploy/administer a website?

I'm accustomed to writing desktop applications in C#.NET. Where I have a nice little solution folder which is also under version control. So at any time, on any computer I can check out whatever version of my software I want run the compiler and have a working copy of my program.

Now I'm looking into developing websites, where the files and data are a lot more dispersed. I'm using ASP.NET, but really my question is more general and could apply to any website framework.

I'm trying to understand the proper work-flow between developing my website, a version control server, and the actual live website that users will see. Obviously this can vary a lot depending on the type and scale of the website, but I'm only considering a pretty simple site. I'm just getting started with this stuff.

The diagram below shows my current idea. All the source files for the site would be stored on a subversion server, which I would check out onto my local computer. My local computer would have a 开发者_JS百科local database which I would use for development of the site. Next I would publish to a test version on my hosted server, which would point to a separate test database. This test database may periodically be replaced by a copy of the live database.

If all goes well I would then publish to a beta version of the site which points to the live data. Users could then check out the beta version to provide feedback. Finally if there are still no problems the source files for the live site would be updated.

Does this make sense? Does anyone have any comments on how this could be improved? Are there any good books or online tutorials available on developing these kind of workflows?

Also the one thing that I'm really not sure about is how to manage changes to the actual schema of the database. I figure with each version I could generate a SQL script that can be use to update the Test and Live databases on the host. However, I'd also like to be able to easily setup a new database for any version of my site with out having to run every update SQL script for every version up to the desired version. Is the best solution to use an ORM like NHibernate or Subsonic so I could always generate my database schema directly from my code?

I currently use a workflow very similar to this. It's not flawless, but for the most part it works well. It sounds like you pretty much have the important parts figured out.

Where I work we have a powerful web server. Our subversion repos also live on this server. For myself, as a LAMP developer, I do all of my development on my local Linux machine (or VM) with a local MySQL database, operating on a local working copy.

At all times I maintain two primary branches of the application: A Dev branch (trunk) and a Live branch (which reflects the current production version). My repo looks like this:

/repo/trunk/        [My current active development version]
/repo/archive/      [All other versions not in active development live here]
/repo/archive/2010.12/  [This happens to be the current production version]

On the web server we maintain three separate instances of the software: Live (or Production), Beta, and Dev. The following should illustrate how we use these versions to

• Dev - Always points to our development version at `/repo/trunk'. Uses a non-vesioned config file to point to the development database. Development is never physically done here however; instead we work on our local machines, where our working copies point to the Trunk, and do all our development testing on our local machines. After several commits from multiple developers, though, it's important to test on the Dev server to make sure we're on the right track and no one is breaking someone else's changes.

• Live - Always points to the most recent stable production version. In this case, it points to /repo/archive/2010.12/. This version is world-accessible.

• Beta - Most of the time, Beta will be a mirror of whats on Live and points to the same production version in our repository (/repo/archive/2010.12). Anytime we need bug fixes on Live, we make them here, test them, and then commit & update live. (We also merge them into Trunk, if necessary.)

When the version in Trunk is deemed complete and ready for testing, I create a new archive branch in the repository for the upcoming new release (i.e. 2011.01) by svn copying the existing production branch. Then I merge the Trunk version into the new branch and commit, so we have a version that mirrors whats currently on Dev. Of course now active development for the next release can continue on Dev, while we Beta test this new Archived version on Beta. When beta testing is complete, we commit any fixes and switch Live to the new version (/repo/archive/2011.01).

Now, you've probably figured out that the database merging is a bit trickier. We use MySQL and, to my knowledge, there's no suitable versioning system for MySQL. So with each migration (VM to Dev, Dev to Beta, Beta to Live) I'll first make a backup of the current database, then make the necessary changes. Personally I use a commercial version of SQLYog which allows me to synchronize the database schema (super handy).