I have just finished phase 1 of an umbraco based site. The client is very happy and has put all their content in. However they are still making little content tweaks here and there, and have the ability to create as much content as they wish, based on the templates I have provided them with.
Now as it's not a good idea for them to be messing around with content directly onto a live site, we've purchased the pro version of umbraco and I've just duplicated the live site/database onto a "staging" site/database (on the same server, but under a different app pool) and I'm currently setting up Courier to allow them to view their content changes on staging before throwing them over to live.
My question is, how do I carry on with development? I take it that courier is just for copying across content? For example, if I want to create new templates, or modify existing templates, create new document types, add new media types, modify the css file etc. what's the best way to do this? Surely Courier can't cope with this?
Do I need ANOTHER environment (called for example "dev"), which is an exact replica of live (but obviously will slowly have out of date content). Then I need to make a note of all dev changes I make to templates, css etc, and then manually replicate them onto staging and live as part of a "phase 2 release"?
Obviously this would be an extremely time consuming phase 2 "deploy" to manually copy each dev change to each server. It would also open up a high risk for human error. Compared to the usual .net NON-cms deployment of just overwriting the web directory, this seems horrific.
Experienced Umbraco developers must have come across this same issue many times, so I'm interested to see how you guys solve this issue
I would like to add to this that I do not recommend developing on a live site!
Main reason for this is that I still think Umbraco is not too reliable/stable. I've made another post where I had a realy weird situation in which I lost all my Document Types and got weird exceptions all over, just for changing the Administrator language. I now how to make a new site and try to copy all content over and hope it will still work after it.
Perhaps this was just something super rare and it will never happen again, I would just like to tell you to be carefull. You don't want to knock something down and have your clients not being able to do anything because of it.
I agree with you about the stability. I did seem to get some weird things happening during my phase 1 development that I managed to rectify by various means that just would not be possible during my phase 2 work (as the site is now live).
I think I will just need to be extra safe and vigilant and take a complete copy of the site and database before touching ANYTHING on live. This way, at least I can roll it all back within 10 minutes or so if need be.
I think this is a problem with most CMS. Most, if not all CMS tend to store lots more in the database than just content (e.g. templates), and this often raises these deployment issues after go live.
These "sync" issues would probably be increased even more in a multi-developer environment. Luckily I'm the only developer working on this. If I think too much about how I would cope with 5 or 6 developers working on a phase 2 release while the client is still putting content into phase, it makes my brain hurt!
That means the structure of the forum is not obvious enough :-) Reason: there is no place to post "Umbraco Pro" questions for courier and concierge. Dirk de Grave already mentioned the lack of that
I faced the same problem with a staging from develop to accept and from accept to production.
The "umbraco"-approach is to make packages for each release... that is quite a lot of work, but you can package almost everything in umbraco. DLL's, masterpages, usercontrols, content-types, data-types, content-nodes and dictionaty-items...
Another (sometimes simpeler) solution I found so far: - From my development machine, I have a .cmd script that copies every relevant subdirectory to a seperate release folder, automatically timestamped with a yyyymmdd prefix, so I have the possibility to rollback a release, what (ofcourse) never happens :-) - The script is also taking care of the correct web.config file by renaming a web.staging.config to web.config. - This does not work when there is a lot of changes in umbraco (document-types, data-types), I did not find a possibility to "compare" the umbraco structure between to installations... is that possibly a feature I overlooked in courier?
With a team of developers you need just one person who does the releases, and a high quality change-log where every developer needs to put his changes in. That way releases sometimes go without problems ;-)
How to develop after go live?
Hello,
I have just finished phase 1 of an umbraco based site. The client is very happy and has put all their content in. However they are still making little content tweaks here and there, and have the ability to create as much content as they wish, based on the templates I have provided them with.
Now as it's not a good idea for them to be messing around with content directly onto a live site, we've purchased the pro version of umbraco and I've just duplicated the live site/database onto a "staging" site/database (on the same server, but under a different app pool) and I'm currently setting up Courier to allow them to view their content changes on staging before throwing them over to live.
My question is, how do I carry on with development? I take it that courier is just for copying across content? For example, if I want to create new templates, or modify existing templates, create new document types, add new media types, modify the css file etc. what's the best way to do this? Surely Courier can't cope with this?
Do I need ANOTHER environment (called for example "dev"), which is an exact replica of live (but obviously will slowly have out of date content). Then I need to make a note of all dev changes I make to templates, css etc, and then manually replicate them onto staging and live as part of a "phase 2 release"?
Obviously this would be an extremely time consuming phase 2 "deploy" to manually copy each dev change to each server. It would also open up a high risk for human error. Compared to the usual .net NON-cms deployment of just overwriting the web directory, this seems horrific.
Experienced Umbraco developers must have come across this same issue many times, so I'm interested to see how you guys solve this issue
Thanks
Rich
Apologies - I've just seen an almost identical post earlier today!
Mind adding the link to that other post?
I would like to add to this that I do not recommend developing on a live site!
Main reason for this is that I still think Umbraco is not too reliable/stable. I've made another post where I had a realy weird situation in which I lost all my Document Types and got weird exceptions all over, just for changing the Administrator language. I now how to make a new site and try to copy all content over and hope it will still work after it.
Perhaps this was just something super rare and it will never happen again, I would just like to tell you to be carefull. You don't want to knock something down and have your clients not being able to do anything because of it.
Hi SaphuA - the post was only about 8 hours ago and you can find it here
http://our.umbraco.org/forum/getting-started/installing-umbraco/2918-Update-an-Umbraco-website
I agree with you about the stability. I did seem to get some weird things happening during my phase 1 development that I managed to rectify by various means that just would not be possible during my phase 2 work (as the site is now live).
I think I will just need to be extra safe and vigilant and take a complete copy of the site and database before touching ANYTHING on live. This way, at least I can roll it all back within 10 minutes or so if need be.
I think this is a problem with most CMS. Most, if not all CMS tend to store lots more in the database than just content (e.g. templates), and this often raises these deployment issues after go live.
These "sync" issues would probably be increased even more in a multi-developer environment. Luckily I'm the only developer working on this. If I think too much about how I would cope with 5 or 6 developers working on a phase 2 release while the client is still putting content into phase, it makes my brain hurt!
Cheers
Rich
That means the structure of the forum is not obvious enough :-) Reason: there is no place to post "Umbraco Pro" questions for courier and concierge. Dirk de Grave already mentioned the lack of that
I faced the same problem with a staging from develop to accept and from accept to production.
The "umbraco"-approach is to make packages for each release... that is quite a lot of work, but you can package almost everything in umbraco. DLL's, masterpages, usercontrols, content-types, data-types, content-nodes and dictionaty-items...
Another (sometimes simpeler) solution I found so far:
- From my development machine, I have a .cmd script that copies every relevant subdirectory to a seperate release folder, automatically timestamped with a yyyymmdd prefix, so I have the possibility to rollback a release, what (ofcourse) never happens :-)
- The script is also taking care of the correct web.config file by renaming a web.staging.config to web.config.
- This does not work when there is a lot of changes in umbraco (document-types, data-types), I did not find a possibility to "compare" the umbraco structure between to installations... is that possibly a feature I overlooked in courier?
Nico
With a team of developers you need just one person who does the releases, and a high quality change-log where every developer needs to put his changes in. That way releases sometimes go without problems ;-)
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