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"It is one of the most complex ones you can imagine. It may even be self-aware. We're honestly not sure. Things keep disappearing from the office in the middle of the night, replaced with laser-printed notes reading THE REVOLUTION IS COMING."

True! VersionPress looks promising and I hope it works well.

But it's sort of scary how many things are accomplished through workarounds/hacks in WordPress. Like deploying a site, where you need third-party scripts (or write your own) to change strings in the database without breaking WordPress' serialisation mechanisms...

To be fair many PHP + MySQL CMSses suffer from similar issues. At least WordPress was hackable enough for us to ship as a mere plugin which I think will be important down the road for user adoption.

Agreed. When we need to move things around we dump, find/replace and then re-serialize via https://github.com/rysi3k/Fix-Serialization. It's crazy there isn't a better way and the way WordPress handles URLs could be better.

Have you considered using wp export/import in lieu of actual database dumps?

http://wp-cli.org/commands/export/

Is that positive or negative? :)