We have a few sites which are monsters and are live. To add new functionality to these (doctypes,datatypes and xslt etc etc) we dupe the site/db and develop new functionality locally (under source control).
The question is what is the best way to ship all the data to the production version. At the moment we have to copy things manually bar DocTypes which we can export - although all datatypes still need to be done manually afterwards.
We've started looking at Courier 2. We're trialling it on a large new site we're working on, and so far it's been pretty good. We found a few issues with some data types, which Per has fixed pretty quickly (mostly relating to the tags DataType).
If you use a lot of custom data types that store node id's (like uComponents) then you may need to write some custom data resolvers (version 2.5 should handle most of the basic uComponents datatypes, like the multi-node tree picker). You will also have to write resulvers for datatypes that store data in custom database tables.
Our initial tests have been very promising, its a very good way of copying content, doctypes etc from dev to live. There are a few things like Datatypes that seem to be better copied manually, but its a simple task to package those up for installation on the live site.
I'm not sure if there's a trial version available, it might be worth getting in touch with the guys to see. There's an express version that you can't write resolvers for, which is fine for simple sites, and the pro version, which you can extend and do a lot more with (like write command line clients etc, handy for build server based deployment).
I will have a look at Courier 2, thanks for the heads up. So how is you dev enviroment setup? Do you develop locally but have a shared Umbraco DB somewhere?
Any advice would be great - we are progressing from mainly single developer created sites to multi-dev and would be good to get some advice on the subject
We're in a similar situation to you, previously it was a small team, working pretty much one dev per site. This is the first big project where we've had more than one dev at the same time working on a site.
At the moment, we have a central database that's shared between devs, and they each have a local version that is checked into SVN and then pulled onto a central dev box so that people can see the current version of the site. It's not 100%, as sometimes you'll get errors where things in the database are looking for files that haven't been checked in yet, but it's OK for now. We're looking at using Courier to check DB changes etc into SVN as well (there's some info about this in the documentation for Courier) as that would allow completely separate copies for each developer, but we haven't really got very far with it so far, due to time constraints!
Hopefully some of the other guys will chime in, I know there's a lot of different ways that people work with multiple devs!
Development to Production
Hi All,
We have a few sites which are monsters and are live. To add new functionality to these (doctypes,datatypes and xslt etc etc) we dupe the site/db and develop new functionality locally (under source control).
The question is what is the best way to ship all the data to the production version. At the moment we have to copy things manually bar DocTypes which we can export - although all datatypes still need to be done manually afterwards.
Any advice would be great
Adrian
We've started looking at Courier 2. We're trialling it on a large new site we're working on, and so far it's been pretty good. We found a few issues with some data types, which Per has fixed pretty quickly (mostly relating to the tags DataType).
If you use a lot of custom data types that store node id's (like uComponents) then you may need to write some custom data resolvers (version 2.5 should handle most of the basic uComponents datatypes, like the multi-node tree picker). You will also have to write resulvers for datatypes that store data in custom database tables.
Our initial tests have been very promising, its a very good way of copying content, doctypes etc from dev to live. There are a few things like Datatypes that seem to be better copied manually, but its a simple task to package those up for installation on the live site.
I'm not sure if there's a trial version available, it might be worth getting in touch with the guys to see. There's an express version that you can't write resolvers for, which is fine for simple sites, and the pro version, which you can extend and do a lot more with (like write command line clients etc, handy for build server based deployment).
Hope that helps!
:)
Thanks Tim,
I will have a look at Courier 2, thanks for the heads up. So how is you dev enviroment setup? Do you develop locally but have a shared Umbraco DB somewhere?
Any advice would be great - we are progressing from mainly single developer created sites to multi-dev and would be good to get some advice on the subject
Adrian
We're in a similar situation to you, previously it was a small team, working pretty much one dev per site. This is the first big project where we've had more than one dev at the same time working on a site.
At the moment, we have a central database that's shared between devs, and they each have a local version that is checked into SVN and then pulled onto a central dev box so that people can see the current version of the site. It's not 100%, as sometimes you'll get errors where things in the database are looking for files that haven't been checked in yet, but it's OK for now. We're looking at using Courier to check DB changes etc into SVN as well (there's some info about this in the documentation for Courier) as that would allow completely separate copies for each developer, but we haven't really got very far with it so far, due to time constraints!
Hopefully some of the other guys will chime in, I know there's a lot of different ways that people work with multiple devs!
Tim,
Looks like we are on the same page on this, exactly how I am approaching it.
As you say, hopefully others will comment on this post matter
Adrian
is working on a reply...