Beta/live environments and scheduling catalog updates

[nobuttsalex]

We run over 20 websites on a bespoke platform. We have an instance of the platform on beta.examplesite1.com, beta.examplesite2.com etc. where our marketing team make category/product/page updates to the beta sites and overnight we copy the changes to the live instances if they opt the site in for a "beta2live". This works really well as the marketing team can see their changes reflected on the beta sites and know what their changes will look like when it is live. The designers also create their themes in this beta environment which works well also.

We are currently investigating the possibility of moving our sites from our bespoke platform to Magento 2. As a platform Magento 2 will do a lot of what we need out of the box however we cannot see any way how we could keep working the same way we do now with our beta and live environments. Is it possible to do this? And if not, how do other businesses tackle these same challenges?

Any comments or suggestions are appreciated.

[akent99]

Sorry for not replying earlier - got behind with some things the on leave for almost a month.

Magento 2.1 EE includes a new feature called "content staging". You can have marketing folks set up various changes, preview them, but not have them take effect until a future date. I think this addresses your needs.

There are some forms of changes however that are best to do in separate environments where database schema changes are involved. This does not sound like the circumstance you are describing however. The Magento Cloud offering makes this easier to do however - you can clone a database, make changes, then throw the results away after say testing a database schema change is complete.