Environments and Site Types

Environments

Environment	Meaning
Production	The live environment serving the primary audience.
Staging	A review or validation environment before production.
Development	A working environment for active changes when available.

Promotion Flow

Changes typically move from development to production through staging, never directly. The flow below shows the most common path and the kind of work that happens at each step.

flowchart LR
  Dev[Development] --> Staging
  Staging --> Production
  Dev -. hotfix .-> Production

• Development to Staging. Changes are merged or imported into staging for review. Staging should match production closely enough that a problem caught here would also have appeared on production.
• Staging to Production. Once the change is reviewed and verified on staging, it is promoted to production. The promotion is deliberate, not automatic, so that the team has a clear gate before live visitors see the change.
• Hotfix path. In rare cases a fix must go directly to production. Use this path only when the alternative is a longer outage, and follow up by reconciling the same change back through staging and development.

Note

For hosted sites, the promotion path is part of the platform itself; see Domains and Deployments for how a hosted-site deploy moves between environments and how DNS is involved at the production cutover.

Site Types

Site Type	Meaning
Hosted site	A WordPress site TMXIO hosts and operates for you.
External site	A self-hosted WordPress site connected to TMXIO by plugin.

The site type changes which support flows apply. A hosted site’s recovery path runs through TMXIO infrastructure; an external site’s recovery path runs through the plugin and the customer’s own hosting.

Note

Lens behaves slightly differently depending on the site type and the environment. See Environment Behavior for how Lens captures, scopes, and routes feedback across environments.

Why This Matters

Many support issues are really environment or site-type mix-ups. A change that looks broken on production may simply not have been promoted from staging yet. A plugin that reports as disconnected on an external site is following a different recovery path than a hosted site with the same status label.

Use this page when a guide tells you to verify which environment or site type you are working with, then cross-link into the matching hosted-sites, external-sites, or Lens page for the workflow itself.