Issues with Copying a theme to a staging website

I have copied a theme from my production web site to a staging web site but when I make it live it doesn't look the same as my production site For example the banner graphics do not appear and the number of featured products is different. I managed to find some image locations in the root of assets but the configuration of the theme doesn't seem to copy over. Can anyone help please

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Erik Merkley

That seems odd. To clarify, you mean you duplicated your live theme within the same Neto account? You're not talking about two different Neto accounts?

Can you explain exactly what folder paths you copied and where to?

Themes live under /httpdocs/assets/themes/. Did you duplicate the entire theme folder in there?

Can you also post a link to your staging theme? (ie. with ?nview=)

Paul Lennox

Sorry to clarify there are two different accounts. We are using one account purely for testing code, settings etc.

Erik Merkley

Ah I see, then that is the expected behaviour.

The theme is not your whole site. Rather it's a set of template code files and other resources that Neto uses to generate the pages on your site. These templates pull in information from all different places in your account - product and customer data, but also more obscure settings. For example, the banner graphics are coming from Webstore > Advertising Campaigns. The featured product list could be coming from the same place, or else it's being hard limited by a config setting.

I understand your desire for a staging site, particularly if you had one in a previous ecommerce system. Unfortunately Neto doesn't do this very well. You'll spend a lot of time trying to get all the config and content consistent across the two. Much more time than it's worth to be able to experiment. Typically once you have the core settings right for your business and your site launched, you won't need to make any drastic config changes.

However, Neto does do an excellent job of staging template code. You can have as many themes as you want (and just copy/paste the folder exactly as you have) to use for development. You can preview the entire site using a staging theme without making it public. This is how the vast majority of development is done within Neto.

https://developers.maropost.com/documentation/neto-designer-documentation/getting-started/staging-themes/

Whether you intend on making heavy customizations to your theme or just doing regular ongoing tweaks, you probably won't get much value from a separate staging account. Almost everything will be done in code-level template changes that you can just use theme previews for. Some stores have dozens of copies of their theme with old code they can roll back to, or developers like me maintain their entire theme code base in source control for easy version management and deployment.