Developing mutliple sites from 1 umbraco development
I have an idea to build a site using Umbraco, the type of site which could be reused over and over with small tweaks to the design here and there, then the client manages the content as normal.
Ideally I would like that each site that I create from the Umbraco source can be easily updated if I add new features to the source (or updates from Umbraco), kind of like a centralised source code that can be deployed to no matter how many sites are deployed from the source.
Is this possible or has anyone managed to do something similar?
I've had very similar thoughts myself in the last month. I'd reached the point where the idea of installng the same packages again just seemd like a massive time suck that I couldn't be passing on to clients.
So I hit upon the idea of creating a blank install with everything I needed. The first step was to create a visual studio project that would keep my base install up to date and able to pull down any libraries via nuget. In all fairness without visual studio you could do that step in WebMatrix.
I then dropped the whole Site root into source control with GitHub. Booting the site and completing the installation I began to add all my usual packages.
Once I was happy with that I forked my repository and ddi a little work on the resulting fork. In the fork I deleted the database connection string from web.config and removed the version number. I also deleted everything from the App_Data folder with the exception of packages folder.
This left me with a file set that could be deployed the the server and installed as normal but that would contain all my package usual suspects.
This package allows you to export datatypes and documtypes into a re-deployable file that could be included allow with everything else. Unfortunately at the time I last tried the package MVC support wasn't pressent and so it was less useful for my scenario.
Failing that you can always use Umbraco built in package creation tool to pack up all your content for re-deployment.
Anyway thats how I tackled the problem, hope it helps =)
Developing mutliple sites from 1 umbraco development
I have an idea to build a site using Umbraco, the type of site which could be reused over and over with small tweaks to the design here and there, then the client manages the content as normal.
Ideally I would like that each site that I create from the Umbraco source can be easily updated if I add new features to the source (or updates from Umbraco), kind of like a centralised source code that can be deployed to no matter how many sites are deployed from the source.
Is this possible or has anyone managed to do something similar?
S
Hi Stephen,
I've had very similar thoughts myself in the last month. I'd reached the point where the idea of installng the same packages again just seemd like a massive time suck that I couldn't be passing on to clients.
So I hit upon the idea of creating a blank install with everything I needed. The first step was to create a visual studio project that would keep my base install up to date and able to pull down any libraries via nuget. In all fairness without visual studio you could do that step in WebMatrix.
I then dropped the whole Site root into source control with GitHub. Booting the site and completing the installation I began to add all my usual packages.
Once I was happy with that I forked my repository and ddi a little work on the resulting fork. In the fork I deleted the database connection string from web.config and removed the version number. I also deleted everything from the App_Data folder with the exception of packages folder.
This left me with a file set that could be deployed the the server and installed as normal but that would contain all my package usual suspects.
I did try to take this one step further with the excellent usitebuilder admin http://our.umbraco.org/projects/backoffice-extensions/usitebuilder-admin
This package allows you to export datatypes and documtypes into a re-deployable file that could be included allow with everything else. Unfortunately at the time I last tried the package MVC support wasn't pressent and so it was less useful for my scenario.
Failing that you can always use Umbraco built in package creation tool to pack up all your content for re-deployment.
Anyway thats how I tackled the problem, hope it helps =)
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