I do not know enough about VM but I am curious if it is possible. is it possible to have just base initial image for flywheel which you can then have linked clones for each wordpress instance? That way, iff there is no change for the base provisioning, it need not be updated. I figure that could be added to the app interface as a flag to check if an update is necessary. to update the base clone. And then as the wp instances can be a linked clone, it may improve performance and allow multiple base clones and linked clones? Just curious,
On an aside, I wanted to understand why a search and replace mechanism is used to change every domain occurence. Is it possible to have an on demand change? If this is possible, does it also make sense to then capture the on demand database updates? Basicaly a very different mechanism. Meaning you can change the structure of pulls and pushes. Possibly a mirrored db associated with the site? Meaning that the local instance would interface with the mirrored db, and would perform the db changes, capturing the changes to be made to push to the site in the current model, or to staging.
I am not remotely sure if ithis would work, but was curious for my own edification. The way I see it, if possible, it would reduce a lot of the pull and push changes to make them on demand checking and updating and recording to synch the mirror and prod databases. Just curious.