Suggestion to PrestaShop Development Team

[Icarus]

Design PrestaShop so it will be friendly to a standard development environment - using a dev server and a live server.
This is the long topic name for this suggestion.

I am pretty positive that many people opening a serious website, have their own development server.
Maybe its a simple XAMPP environment, maybe its something more.
One thing is certain - for big, serious websites, there is always a development server and a live server (at the very least).

One of the bigger problems I have had with all the "third party" products - such as blog systems, CMS systems and shopping carts, is that they are not too friendly with allowing this kind of interactyion.
For example:
When I am adding products to my catalog, this action is originated on my development server.
I do the import, the image thumbnailing and whatnot. All on the development server, since there is no use of putting this live, until the entire catalog editing operation is ready.

On the other hand, when a customer makes a purchase, this operation is originated in the live server.

So, after just one purchase, my development environment is different than the live environment, and I cannot mirror my entire dev server to the live server.


So what is it I am suggesting? Simple. Two way, smart sync between two PrestaShop systems.

This system can be external to Presta at all, and work at the database/filesystem level or can be integrated, but the concept is the same.
This system also must be as efficient as possible, so that when a sync is performed, there is no interruption to the end user on the live server.

I am assuming that anyone serious enough about web development, have their own FTP mirroring software or script, so files are not an issue.
The only thing about files, is that the system must not override them.
For example, in Presta, settings.inc.php is somtimes overwritten.

The more serious problem is with databases (it also applies to blogs and CMS systems and other ready made web bapps).
If only there could be a button, or better, a script accessible by HTTP, that:
1. Generates a dump of some tables from live server.
2. Downloads the dump to the dev server
3. Injects the dump to the dev server
4. Doing the opposite (with the rest of the tables) from dev to live.

Of course, I am not suggesting a design, just a concept for thought.
The main problem for me in Presta now, is that the import process is too long and inefficient.
So, there is no way for me to use it on a live server, since it takes forever.

Specifically about this - it looks like the image generation is taking most of the time.
So the process I am aspiring to is:
1. Generate the import (as long as it takes) on dev
2. Upload all files to live (will be as fast as my internet connection is)
3. Dump the local database to the live server (should be fast, since its just SQL dump of a few thousand lines, done from live to live)

This way, there is no downtime, and both systems have done their job and are in sync.

Anyways, I thought I would put this out in the open.