Our development model has been to work on a local version, and then copy it to the live server. That's fine on the first take, but for subsequent development once the site is live, we're a bit confused.
There seems to be some content stored on the disk and some in the database. What is the difference, where is this duplicated, what takes preference, etc?
Could you advise or point me to the resources that document this?
There's not a huge amount of documentation on this, although there is Matt's diagram illustrating the anatomy of an umbraco page: http://blog.mattbrailsford.com/2011/04/07/anatomy-of-an-umbraco-document/ if you look at the updates at the bottom, he links to some other blog posts that go into more detail about the structure of what's where etc.
The main issue with working on a site after it's live is around document ID's which are numeric, and can easily get out of sync between a live and dev environment. There is a commercial add on to Umbraco, Courier 2 (http://umbraco.com/products/more-add-ons/courier-2.aspx). This is an add on for Umbraco that allows you to bundle up changes into a one click deployment package that you can send from dev to live (or back the other way if you want to grab new content from live). It handles working out document id's and re iding them when moving from one environment to another. It can also include other things in the packages like custom dll's etc. If you've got a complex site with a lot of custom datatypes, it requires some custom coding, but it's very handy for moving changes from dev to live, without having to re-add everything to the live site manually!
With my limited understanding, it appears that some content is duplicated, keeping one copy on the file system and another in the database. Do you know how this works and what the motivation is?
Understanding database vs file system
Our development model has been to work on a local version, and then copy it to the live server. That's fine on the first take, but for subsequent development once the site is live, we're a bit confused.
There seems to be some content stored on the disk and some in the database. What is the difference, where is this duplicated, what takes preference, etc?
Could you advise or point me to the resources that document this?
Hi Savage,
There's not a huge amount of documentation on this, although there is Matt's diagram illustrating the anatomy of an umbraco page: http://blog.mattbrailsford.com/2011/04/07/anatomy-of-an-umbraco-document/ if you look at the updates at the bottom, he links to some other blog posts that go into more detail about the structure of what's where etc.
The main issue with working on a site after it's live is around document ID's which are numeric, and can easily get out of sync between a live and dev environment. There is a commercial add on to Umbraco, Courier 2 (http://umbraco.com/products/more-add-ons/courier-2.aspx). This is an add on for Umbraco that allows you to bundle up changes into a one click deployment package that you can send from dev to live (or back the other way if you want to grab new content from live). It handles working out document id's and re iding them when moving from one environment to another. It can also include other things in the packages like custom dll's etc. If you've got a complex site with a lot of custom datatypes, it requires some custom coding, but it's very handy for moving changes from dev to live, without having to re-add everything to the live site manually!
:)
With my limited understanding, it appears that some content is duplicated, keeping one copy on the file system and another in the database. Do you know how this works and what the motivation is?
is working on a reply...