Here's my situation: I am a web developer with multiple clients. I want to use Umbraco for each of my clients and get them into the world of CMS.
I want to be able to develop multiple sites (1 for each of my clients) on my PC using Localhost and then deploy each individual site to some (possibly different) host environment for each of my clients.
My quandry is how to I gather only the changes for one web site from my dev environment and move those changes to the production site where the customer may have made changes to their content already? I didn't really want to learn Contour or anything else right now apart from Umbraco as I am a newbie to ASP, Umbraco and SQL Server. I feel the learning curve would be just too steep.
I need to know if my development life cycle is possible? If so, precisely which folders do I need to move from my localhost inetpub/wwwwroot to my production site and how do I capture the changes in the SQL Server database and then update for only my specific client at the host without disrupting the wonderful content that they are creating in the live environment. And without introducing unecessary code from any of my other client sites.
BTW I have read many posts on similar subjects in the Forum but none quite go detailed enough for me to be confident that I understand the entire lifecycle. Any help woud be greatly appreciated.
thanks for the quick reply (and nice to hear from a fellow Kiwi :-).
Does Umbraco not make changes in the database then when you say create a new document type for the site?
Can you also direct me to where you learned how and what to put in a package? I am signed up for UmbracoTV but I didn't see anything on poackages there.
It does update sql when you make changes and create a document type but it will only do so on your locahost and the database connected to your local version, or the host where you make the changes. Since umbraco stores it's data in a combination of the database and filesystem, you will need to transfer both of those changes to your production servers.
The packaging feature in umbraco should do both, depending on what your doing. It allows you to specify document types, files, and content nodes that should be packaged so you can transfer them to your production server.
Development Life Cycle - multiple dev sites
Here's my situation: I am a web developer with multiple clients. I want to use Umbraco for each of my clients and get them into the world of CMS.
I want to be able to develop multiple sites (1 for each of my clients) on my PC using Localhost and then deploy each individual site to some (possibly different) host environment for each of my clients.
My quandry is how to I gather only the changes for one web site from my dev environment and move those changes to the production site where the customer may have made changes to their content already? I didn't really want to learn Contour or anything else right now apart from Umbraco as I am a newbie to ASP, Umbraco and SQL Server. I feel the learning curve would be just too steep.
I need to know if my development life cycle is possible? If so, precisely which folders do I need to move from my localhost inetpub/wwwwroot to my production site and how do I capture the changes in the SQL Server database and then update for only my specific client at the host without disrupting the wonderful content that they are creating in the live environment. And without introducing unecessary code from any of my other client sites.
BTW I have read many posts on similar subjects in the Forum but none quite go detailed enough for me to be confident that I understand the entire lifecycle. Any help woud be greatly appreciated.
Jacqui,
I work in a similar fashion - i don't bother to keep content in sync once I have released a site to the customer.
For updates to the site i.e. changes to templates, CSS, user controls/dll's I will just FTp the new version over.
If it is just a minor change to a document type I will update the new document types manually
If there are significant new changes I will package them up on my dev machine and release to the prod site.
Remember, testing and backups are good things :)
Paul
Hey paul,
thanks for the quick reply (and nice to hear from a fellow Kiwi :-).
Does Umbraco not make changes in the database then when you say create a new document type for the site?
Can you also direct me to where you learned how and what to put in a package? I am signed up for UmbracoTV but I didn't see anything on poackages there.
Thanks Jacqui
Jacqui,
It does update sql when you make changes and create a document type but it will only do so on your locahost and the database connected to your local version, or the host where you make the changes. Since umbraco stores it's data in a combination of the database and filesystem, you will need to transfer both of those changes to your production servers.
The packaging feature in umbraco should do both, depending on what your doing. It allows you to specify document types, files, and content nodes that should be packaged so you can transfer them to your production server.
Blog post about how to implement packages: http://www.bayshield.com/2010/1/4/creating-a-package-in-umbraco
-Chris
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