Simulate the launch of Magento in the future

Question

Now I am working with a corporate client who uses the functions "Directory Events in Magento". For those who are not familiar, this means that they have product categories available only to customers between specific dates.

I am working on creating for them a good environment for conducting / testing, which every day (and anonymizes) all the data on the site to give them a modern playground. One of the things I want to do as part of this is to let them speed up the transition to a future date and see how the site will look like on that date (sales, events, holiday projects, etc.).

Does anyone know of a clean way to trick Magento into starting everything up as if we were some other day? I don’t think that changing server time is a well-extensible solution (there are several tests for people on this machine, plus it stinks as a hack), so the optimal answer will even be localized for a specific user session.

Answer 1

Have you considered virtualization. I regularly try to use it for testing and even in development environments. Yes, changing the server time is a hack, but in a virtual machine that is trivial, and you can control what you need, the status of the rollback, etc. I know that this is not quite what you were thinking; how elegant, etc., but it can satisfy your customers needs.

VM (VMWare, VirtualBox, Parallels). , ESX ESXi ( ). HyperV, MS XenServer.