General, automated WordPress-to-WordPress sync is unsolvable

Twenty-three years into WordPress, the general problem of site synchronization is still unsolved. We have great tools for the slices, but nothing for the whole. You can’t reliably automate any of these tasks beyond basic sites: Export posts, media, Woo products, and all their associated plugin data, and import it all on another live site. Publish posts on a staging site and sync them to the production site upon acceptance. Clone a live site, install and configure a plugin, and deploy it all back to production. Build a site locally, deploy it to production, and re-deploy as the local site evolves. Migrate the entire site to another host. This post exhaustively covers what makes these problems so difficult, and what we can do instead. It is a 2600 words deep dive. It reflects many discussions I’ve had with Dennis Snell over the years, as well as what I’ve learned from WordPress.com, the WordPress importer plugin, the Site Transfer protocol, Playground, the more recent Reprint,…