Content Relay – Push Pages and Posts from Staging to Live

Content Relay is a WordPress plugin for moving one piece of content between the environments of the same site: development, staging and production. It relays a single page, post or custom post type entry, with every translation, its media and what it needs, in either direction.

Typical uses:

• A page built on staging is approved and has to go live on production.
• A page edited on production is needed on development to work on it with real content.
• A batch of posts written on one environment has to appear on another.

In each case you move only that content, without copying a whole database or overwriting what else changed on the other site. The receiving site shows a plan first, nothing is written until an administrator approves it, and every relay can be rolled back.

The theme must match

Content Relay only works between sites running the same theme at the same version. The receiving site checks this before it plans anything:

• A different active theme, or a different theme version, blocks the relay.
• The same version with different theme files gives a warning, because the theme deploy may be incomplete.

Deploy the theme first, then relay the content. Content Relay moves content; it never moves theme or plugin code.

What a relay carries

• The page or post and every translation of it (WPML), with fields, meta, Yoast SEO data and its terms.
• The images and files it uses. The original upload is sent once and the receiving site regenerates the image sizes. A file with the same name but different bytes is saved under a new name, never overwritten.
• References inside the content: block attributes, ACF fields, image IDs in HTML and links to the sending site, all rewritten to the receiving site's IDs and address.
• Terms the content is assigned to that the receiving site lacks, created in the right language.

Content is written byte for byte. Block markup is edited only where a reference changes; it is never re-serialized.

A relay does not carry the theme, menus, widgets, site options, plugin settings, user accounts or comments.

How it works

The same plugin runs on both sites. The receiving site issues a key and the sending site stores it as a connection.

1. Discover. The sending site walks from the chosen content to everything it references and builds a manifest.
2. Upload. Files are sent in resumable chunks. Every request is signed with Ed25519 and carries a timestamp and a single-use nonce.
3. Plan. The receiving site answers with what it will create, update, reuse or refuse, with a diff for anything it would replace.
4. Apply. After an administrator approves the plan, the receiving site takes a backup and commits the content in one database transaction.
5. Check. Caches are cleared, and the sending site fetches the relayed pages to check their status, language, links and images.

Every relay is logged on both sites under Tools → Content Relay history and can be rolled back from either.

Where you use it

• Relay to… on a row in Pages, or in any other content list switched on under Settings → Content Relay.
• WP-CLI: wp content-relay plan, push, push-many, verify, rollback, history, keys and connections.
• An offline bundle (wp content-relay bundle, plan, apply) for sites that cannot reach each other.

Content Relay contacts only the sites you connect it to. It uses no third-party service and does no tracking.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.4 or newer
• PHP 7.4 or newer
• InnoDB tables
• HTTPS on the receiving site
• The same theme, at the same version, on both sites

WPML, ACF (including ACF blocks), core blocks and Yoast SEO are supported. Polylang and Elementor content are not.

Installation

1. Install and activate Content Relay on both sites.
2. On the receiving site, open Settings → Content Relay, switch Receiving on and issue a key. Copy it: it is shown once.
3. On the sending site, open Settings → Content Relay, switch Sending on and add a connection by pasting the key.
4. Deploy the same theme, at the same version, to both sites.
5. On the sending site, hover a page in Pages and choose Relay to….

The full user documentation, including hooks, security details and the FAQ, is in readme.txt.

Development

You need PHP, Composer, Node.js and Docker.

composer install
npm install
npm run env:start

npm run env:start starts a WordPress site at http://localhost:8900 with the plugin active.

License

Content Relay is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2.0 or later.