Bjorn

Thanks for the comments guys! What diogo wrote is pretty much what I am doing now - but that would imply that I lock down the live site whilst I am developing, which is not ideal. I do like LostKobrakai's proposal which I never considered before. It would make it slightly lengthy to build the instructions and more so to test it (when it fails, you have to restore DB backups, correct the instructions and then try again). Indeed it looks as if there is no silver bullet here. Pity.

Before getting to my question: Sorry if this has been discussed already... I am reasonably new to using Processwire, but think it's absolutely great! I have built my site using it and will be moving it to a production environment for use by various people. My question is how to go about the ongoing development of the site when I use a development/staging area and not loose data in the production environment when I have to update? As part of my ongoing development, I will be editing template files, possibly adding modules, configuring modules and making changes in the database i.e. new fields, modifying fields etc. When I need to update the live server, inserting/updating the files on the filesystem is easy enough (will probably use Git) - but how to update the database when users have been making their own updates & content via the front-end? Obviously my dev-version of the database will not have this new content... Re-playing all the modifications on the production server (i.e. config of modules, updating fields etc.) is also not really an option since this is very error-prone and a tedious affair. Can someone possibly help me here?

I just installed a fresh copy of PW and for some reason I am not seeing the Page Tree in the backend admin area (whereas I cannot remember having to install some separately to see this). I now only see "Find" and "Recent". Can someone please give me a hint as to what I am missing?