PBJ Studio Sync 3.7.0 — the content-axis gate

A sync tool has one job it must never get wrong: it must not destroy the thing it is copying to. PBJ Studio Sync 3.7.0 closes the one way it could.

The problem, honestly

A push sends content from your local Studio site up to your live site, matching posts by their slug. If your Studio copy of a page is older than the live one, the push quietly replaces the newer live version with the stale local one. Every stage reports success. Nothing warns you.

The pre-push safety check only ever compared plugin files. It had no idea what your content looked like. So a Studio site could drift months behind live and nobody would know until a routine full push took the newer work with it.

What 3.7.0 does

Before any push that includes posts or pages, both sides are compared by slug and last-modified date, and the push refuses to run if Studio is behind live on anything, or if live has content Studio does not have. It stops before a single byte is sent — no session is opened on the live site and nothing is written.

And it tells you whether it actually matters

A bulk re-save on a live site can change sixty timestamps without changing a single word. A refusal that just said “sixty items behind” would be useless, so each blocked item is listed with its type, its slug, both dates, and a verdict: same (timestamp only) or DIFFERS. That comparison happens on the live server, so post bodies never travel across the wire.

When you know the drift is harmless you can override it — but only on purpose. You type a confirmation phrase, the approval lasts ten minutes, it is consumed by the very next push, and it is bound to the exact list of conflicts you were shown. Approving today’s harmless drift can never silently approve tomorrow’s real one.

Also in this release

• Pull live’s CRM and Helpdesk records down into Studio so you can build against real tickets and contacts. Live is only ever read from.
• Automatic backup cleanup. Backups were never tidied up at all. Keep the newest few — off by default, and until you turn it on it only reports what it would remove.
• Drive the whole thing without a browser. Studio-only endpoints plus a companion tool mean a release or a diagnosis no longer depends on clicking through wp-admin. They refuse outright on a live site.
• A clock fix that mattered. If your machine’s clock ever moved backwards, the “last push” marker could land in the future and every push after that silently skipped older content while still reporting success.

Getting it

Studio Sync updates itself — you will be offered 3.7.0 in your plugins list. Install it on your Studio site; installing it on the live site as well lets the content check compare content and not just dates.