Development - solution for many variants of the theme storage

Envato Authors CodeCanyon
1

Dear experienced authors,

While developing a theme which has let’s say 20-30 variants of demo, what is the best practice to build a demo site based on wordpress multisite plugin or having seperate wordpress installation for each demo?

I see Avada uses multisite in meantime others use seperate wordpress installation.

What is more efficient in practise and what are pros and cons

2

I’d personally say multisite is more tidy way to do it. If I was to list pros for the multisite i’d say:

  • you have a centralised management under one admin dashboard
  • you don’t have to upload X times the updated version of a theme
  • you need just one hosting account (that is if you used a shared hosting)

I can’t really see any cons, but I am not a theme author, so these are just my assumptions.

3

With separate version you can synchronize files with rsync and database structure by mysql replication. One of websites become master others as slave, and checking updates from master.

Advantages: with this variant you don’t have care about compatibility, exporting/importing demo content.

Disadvantage: a lot of copies you should have on your server… and not good approach.

Multi-site version is good, but big disadvantage is exporting/importing demo content, also need to adapt some plugins perhaps…

Expecting answer of those authors who already passed this way