+1. I know Courier is a challenging project, but I don't think they realize the impact this has. Being able to quickly and easily migrate data from instance to instance is a critical feature for our Institution. Now I have management wondering why I talked them into purchasing something they can't use. All I can say is, "uhh, uhh. Their working on it." I've had to make excuses for Umbraco to keep management from getting on the phone with our "Umbraco Support" and chewing them out.

I love Umbraco, but they really need to get some things figured out. All the new stuff they're coming out with is awesome, but it's like they're trying to run a marathon without tying their shoes. 

Hi Dan

Thanks for the support. I'm not expecting millions to rally behind me as Courier is niche compared to the core Umbraco community. But the list of disgruntled posts....is long!

If there's anything I can do to help, fire away, talk more on your own thread if you like?

Martin

+1

I echo the thoughts of Martin and Dan, especially when its a paid for add-on which is critical for us in promoting content between instances.

It should get the same attention and support as Contour. 

I've had exactly that argument with Per and in his defence, he pointed out that Courier is far more complex than Contour and has far more dependencies on the Umbraco Core. So Tim Geysens it better equiped to react than Per is....

Now whilst I do agree (to a point) with this argument. If Per is struggling as a consequence of the complexities of Courier and it's relationship with the Core, then either more resource is required or a whole new way of thinking about Couriers development going forward.

It doesn't matter which way you look at it, the current arrangement clearly isnt working!

I can understand that courier is more complex. There is also a higher price tag that comes long with it, so you would expect at least the same amount of support.

What I would like to see is regular releases with bugs fixed. It's also not clear where bugs should be submitted. The contour issue list is made public on http://issues.umbraco.org/issues/CON. But I can't find that for courier

I know this is off topic. But there is another package in the Umbraco complete bundle that needs some love and attention.

Concierge : http://umbraco.com/products/more-add-ons/concierge.aspx 

The page actually states that it's not compatible with 4.10.+ and 6. Why still sell it than ? Also the last time I used it on a 4.7 install it didn't had support for razor scripts yet. 

I think Umbraco HQ has 3 options regarding this package 
1. Give it some love and attention so that i can be used again
2. Don't sell it anymore
3. Release it as Open source and let the community maintain this tool.

Dave 

+1

If any of you dont already know nightlies (to be used at your own risk) are released here, but for courier it can be quite slow before builds appear...

http://nightly.umbraco.org/

+1  Courier continues to be more and more distressing to work with in our site deployments.  We're finding that even a simple site structure will invariably be broken once courier has been invoked to move it into our pre-live environment.  Our method of getting it working properly in 4.7.1 is to spend an entire day with our codebase to look for/merge changes in filesystem assets, and spend the next day using courier over and over again until the site looks almost right then manually shift things around.  We basically spend 2-3 days pampering and coercing it to work and that kills our velocity.  It has never been able to deploy a site with the proper structure on its first try or resolve internal dependencies properly.

We've been evaluating the newest versions of Umbraco with our core site structure.  We love Umbraco 6 for its speed over 4.7, and its more robust feature set.  We were so happy to see the upgrade to Umbraco 6 going so smoothly, until we started deployment testing.  It has resisted us at every turn.  

Dear Core Team, 

We love Umbraco.  WE LOVE UMBRACO!!  But Courier is a deal breaker.  Our management is getting really tired of hearing that a product they paid for is holding us back.

Hey everyone

Please vote up this thread! It's only on 2 and quite a few so far are +1'ing me.

I think you'll find it on the first post.

Many thanks

Martin.

I think Martins suggestion is a good one:

"I feel it would make sense to draw Courier into the umbraco core, so when things do change Courier can be tested along with everything else"

However I suspect this creates licensing issues with it being a premium add-on, if courier is only available as a paid add-on then does it make sense to build it into the core? I dont know the answers it's just a thought - something to do with derivatives

Thanks for the reply scb

The licencing would be easy to manage, just add the licensing dll to the core. If you dont have a valid licence key, Courier isnt enabled. Simples! 

Anyway, the point i'm trying to make is the team needs to recognise the current situation simply isnt acceptable. 

Building against Umbraco 6.1.1 and Courier 2.7.7...

Hi SP

Yes 6.1.1 hot fixed up to 2.7.7. I spent an extremely frustrating day yesterday ploughing through our UK site with Courier...Here's what I found out...

My first scenario was an end to end test with a complete siteA and empty siteB (with just packages installed). SiteA did package entirely, although looking through the logs it does look like Courier encountered some issues along the way....but it did complete, impressive given our site is quite large. The package transferred fine across to SiteB but wouldn't deploy at all. Much like you I kept getting KeyNotFound errors. I also had timeouts due to some of our media files being quite large and upping the timeout in the web.config didnt work. So I tried again and this time excluded media from the package, again KeyNotFound errors so I had to give up on the end to end test.

My second scenario was a right click individual node test with a complete siteA and a complete siteB. This seemed to work without any trouble, but I have to admit it would've been difficult explaining the nuances of "dependencies" to our editors. In courier 1.3 you just right click and transfer, job done. In Courier 2 if go with the defaults (not clicking on advanced) it uses all dependencies, in some cases it can take about 10 minutes to transfer a single document/node as Courier is hell bent on discovering just about every "vaguely" linked item and transfering all that as well! I checked out the temporary package it had created and it was 1.6GB of data! Absolutely rediculous! On the other hand the "advanced" options, have too techie written all over them and thats coming from a tech geek! First and foremost Courier should be an editors tool, with added benefits for developers.

So to conclude, as I still cannot trust Courier 2. It's back to the drawing board. Our current Umbraco v4.7 installation has to be upgraded so that I can load up Contour 3, we've been spammed quite heavily on the older version so it's got to be done. Luckily i'm able to patch Courier 1.3 so that it continues to work on Umbraco 4.x. Shame the source code isnt available as i'd bug fix Courier 1.3 so that it worked flawlessly in Courier 6.x too!

You know at the end of the day, I couldnt give a stuff about developer deployment options, I just want a simple and reliable end-user deployment tool. Courier 1.3 isnt perfect, on occasion it will get NodeIds muddled up and it has a tendency to stick newly created media items in the root rather than inside its original folder structure.....But it's nothing that couldnt be bugfixed!

Utterly depressed and thoroughly disappointed!

Martin

Thanks for saying things like they should be! While Courier may never be able to support any kind of Umbraco related deployment, at least the support for it needs to be top notch. That has definitely suffered from preparing Umbraco 7 / Belle to CodeGarden and of course this is neither acceptable or sustainable. 

Give us a few days to discuss this internally and come up with a workable plan. In the meantime, if any of you would be game for a more intensive testing program for making Courier more stable, get in touch with me at [email protected]

Thank you!

Good morning Niels

Thanks for your reply, personally I think there are issues with usability for end-users as much as there are issues with code stability and support. When compared to the simplicity of Courier 1.3, I would suggest you go back to the drawing board on this.

I suggested to Per some months back, why not fix Courier 1.3 for all current versions of Umbraco? But as he's clearly invested so much time in Courier 2, Per dismissed the idea pretty quickly.

In view of the amount of time passed since Courier 2 was first announced, I would firmly suggest you pull down Courier 2 for now and fix Courier 1.3 so at least we have something we can rely on all the way up to Umbraco 6.1.x. I'd more than happily help test it!

With a small patch in the Umbraco library Courier 1.3 works all the way up to Umbraco 4.11.9 so I don't see it taking long get working in Umbraco 6.

Doing this would buy you plenty of time to work out where you go with Courier 2.

Thats my thoughts on the subject, and more than happy to help solve the problems too!

Regards

Martin.

Hi Martin, Niels

I don't think going back to Courier 1.3 is a step forward. Solving the issues in Courier 2.7 is the way to go.

As I understand people are using courier in different scenario's. If I understand correctly Martin uses it to deploy content changes from one environment to another. We only use it to deploy code changes.

To most of the issues we are having are minor and we can work around them.

I should have reported them but I don't know where and it seems this forum is not very actively monitored by the Courier development team aka Per.

@Niels, would it be possible to set up Youtrack to also have the courier issues in it like it has for contour ? I would also like to help to test if this would make the product better.

I appreciate people may use Courier 2 in differenet ways!

Yes for us our site(s) are big enough to warrant editing being done on a staging server with changes being transferred to live by our end-users so ease of use and quick deployment is imperative!

I DO NOT agree that fixing Courier 1.3 is a bad move as a temporary measure, particularly for people using Courier in the way that we do!

If we hadnt come this far between too many Courier 2 versions to mention (none of which particularly worked well), I wouldnt be making such a drastic suggestion.

But, hey people thought the same when the team pulled the plug on Umbraco 5 and what we've ended up with is way, way better! 

Martin.

We won't go back to v1.3, but the usability of v1 could (and should) be applied to vNext and it would be pretty straight forward. I agree that the current UX is too scary for non devs. What we could do - for editors - is to ensure that v2 would behave like v1 in what it's trying to do. That should make it much more solid (also than v1) for transfering content and media.

The good news - long term - is that the Courier engine gets a lot of love out of the Umbraco as a Service project and have more resources devoted. Short term we need a few days to ensure that what we'd love to promise is also something that we can deliver.

We'll definitely setup a YouTrack project so you can report.

Nice one Niels, we definitely need the bug tracking as we can then quickly see what is working and what isn't without digging through forum ( and duplicating known bugs )

I think the current UX should be retained for dev use maybe under an "Advanced Settings" option or something - its actually very useful to package specific bits rather than package all every time - we have devs using it so its less of a problem - but I can see why it would seem daunting for non-devs

SP

YouTrack would be sexy.

Happy to post bugs, as I'm doing a lot of work with Courier at the moment.

I would say, Courier is fragile, but when it works it works. Tuning is needed.

For content editors -> a easy, 1 click, deploy just 'THIS' node would be nice, rather than deploy this, advanced settings, change drop down, select just 'this' rather than 3 levels of dependancy.... yada yaada ya! 

One day, the database/structure will be rewriten right? And Courier would just be a basic comparison tool right? :D

Huge H5YR to martin for getting this discussion going.  I love the direction we're headed in.  Courier, in theory, is a fantastic tool, however, is definitely falling short in practice. 

I'm a little surprised that so many are using Courier as an editor tool.  Our editors edit content on the live installation only.  Editors can preview their changes before publishing, and publish only when ready. Perhaps there's some differing definitions here on the role of an editor?

For us, exposing editors to multiple installations and utilizing Courier to transfer content would only worsen the situation and potentially become a support nightmare when Courier falls short, which is often.

Neils, I'm really glad that you are coming through on this thread and I'm looking forward to some reasonable short term improvements to Courier.  As you can see, the community is behind you and more than willing to help test and share experiences (myself included).

With that in mind, let me elaborate a bit more on our setup...

1.  One "Live" installation for editors of live sites.

2.  Multiple "Dev/Staging" installations (some localhost, some hosted, usually a recent database and filesystem copy of "Live" to keep existing Ids in sync).  New subweb sites are initially built out entirely on these "Dev/Staging" installations, including Content, Media, Macros, Scripts, CSS, JS, etc.

3.  When a "Dev/Staging" subweb site is ready, Courier is used to transfer it to a duplicate "Pre-Live" site.

4.  Once "Pre-Live" Courier problems are resolved, the site is copied down to "Live" (filesystem and database)

Courier problems usually involve errors presented during packaging/extraction.  Node Ids that are not converted properly (or at all) in templates, macro parameters, pickers, etc.  Missing content/selections, etc.  Our solution in most cases involves repeated Couriers, along with manually fixing node selections through out the Content section (tedious).

Is anyone else operating a similar set up?  I'd love to hear about them and others.  At the very least, it may help Neils and the core team identify improvements that would have the greatest impact across the customer base.

J

I use it the same way James.  We have localhost and other dev instances for building new sites.  We let the client build their initial content into the dev site.  Once everything is set and approved, we use courier to transfer everything to the live site that is multi-tenant.  Courier usually breaks at one point or another so I end up spending more time recreating smaller/ simpler courier pushes mixed in with the old create new package.  Half the time it is just quicker to manually move files over via ftp and then copy and paste.

In response to James: (Is this another thread?)

Even though we are experienceing the same problems the objective is to use courier as follows:

1. Developer instances ( Currently 8 ), each developer has a local copy using CE
2. Changes are deployed as revisions to the dev server for initial testing, when approved they get deployed to Staging and oter developers can grab the latest revision from Dev to stay current
3. Staging environment replicates live environmnet (eg Load balancer + Web farm ) for QA
4. Once passed QA Deployed to live

Thanks guys. 

Its clear that our fundamental objectives for Courier are aligned.

For us, at the moment, Courier will be a developer tool only (mostly for deployments).  As such, my preference would be to keep the techie/advanced options (perhaps even add more options eventually to handle errors/conflicts), work on stability, dependency checking/handling, and the Id conversion process.

James

As promised - an update on Courier future.

TL;DR: Courier is a fundamental cornerstone in both current and future strategy of the Umbraco HQ and we're doing heaps to make it awesome both short and long term.

Short term:

1) Per has been working hard on fixing the most critical bugs in Courier and just published a test version and we'd love if you could help us testing it. You can read more here

2) We'll make some minor adjustments to how Courier deals with changes. Read about it here.

3) For those using Courier to transfer content/media between staging and live (usually bigger customers where there could be legal reasons to ensure a very safe publishing flow): We're looking at improving Courier 2.x with a simpler UX for editors, where it'll work very similarly to Courier v1: It'll only transfer content/media and if there's a difference in types between the environments, it will abort the transfer and notify the end user.

4) We'll make it clearer what Courier can do and can't do in order to make sure that nobody uses Courier in the high hopes that it's the '42' of deployment. Our goal is to make it *really good* at deploying Umbraco data and extensible enough to also handle related non-umbraco data through providers.

Long term:

Based on learnings from using the Courier engine in the up coming Umbraco as a Service, Courier will be re-engineered to use the v6 datalayer (rather than NHibernate) and we'll change the transfer protocol which currently is very fragile when it comes to network issues, which mostly has an impact on bigger transfers.

Moving to the new Umbraco datalayer will allow us to continue making investments in improving both Courier *and* the core and it also means that packages that utilize the new datalayer will be supported by both Courier and Umbraco as a Service.

So to summarize: We will increase the number of ressources on the Courier product, re-use Courier's current dependency engine which is very solid but change the way Courier pack, unpack and transfer data.

Niels, great to hear the upcoming changes and fixes on Courier. The fact that the transfer protocol is also getting some attention is a huge bonus. 

Niels,

Very good timing. Did have to answer a few questions at the Manchester meetup the other day when I talked about Umbraco as a service some people seemed to think it as all hands on deck with that and courier was being neglected. Which I explained wasnt the case!!!

Regards

Ismail

Its great that there seems to be progress with a plan re Courier.  A few further thoughts from frustrations we have experienced having bought the complete umbraco package - it would be great if it could also support the core elements of umbraco, or paid for products!   I.e.:

1) Members

2) Public Access

3) Contour - I know there is a plug in but this is now way out of date and doesn't work on newer versions

In an ideal world we wouldn't have to have a Back Office on our live site but due to the unreliability of Courier we are forced to for those instances where it doesn't quite work or there's no support. Maybe these are things to consider once the issues with the current functionality are ironed out.

Hi Marie

You examples 1-3 dont make any sense to me? Can you explain further? Item 3 - Did you mean Concierge? Contour is very much up-to-date.

Regards

Martin

@Martin think Maria is talking about the Contour provider for Courier which needs an update to be able to transfer some of the Contour v3 related stuff, we'll look into updating this :)

Hi Martin

Apologies if I wasn't making sense.  To clarify

1)  Members, courier does not currently support moving Members between environments.  You can create a member on one environment but Courier does not give you the option to transfer the member to in our case our Live Environment. 

2)  Within the Content Section you can protect a document using the Public Access context menu option for a given content item, but unless you write a Courier Custom Data Resolver to transfer those access rights to your say live environment, your live environment documents are unprotected.

3)  Contour is very much up to date, but there is no way to move a Contour Form between environments other than Exporting from one environment and Importing into another. It is something I would expect Courier to handle. There was previously a custom provider to do this (http://www.nibble.be/?p=103)  but it no longer works with later versions of umbraco/contour/courier, as Tim mentions they are looking at updating but it would be great if it could be included in the Courier by default - although having said that I appreciate Contour does change and so it may not be straightforward to keep the two in sync.

Hope this explains!

Hi Marie

Ah completely with you now!

Yes core/contour options that deserve attention in Courier.

Thanks for raising those as they have been issues for me too!

Martin.

+1 on Contour support.  Thanks Marie.  We are in the same boat, having to export/import forms between installations.

Probably goes without saying, but Contour form workflows should be movable (optionally perhaps) as well.  These, currently, do not export/import.

James

@James yeah I'll look into baking that into the provider 

Realistically, is the Umbraco business model and subsequent revenue leaving the Umbraco team with too few resources?  Umbraco is so widely used, is it time to switch to a different license model where higher traffic users need to start paying a license fee so that it can be properly supported as a product, including the core packages like Courier?  Or should the price of Courier be increased?  As a business user of Umbraco, I need reliability over and above super low software cost

Hi Chris

You raise a very fair point and the company I work for are more than happy to pay licence fees if the software quality and support justifies the price. In the case of Courier, we've paid for a number of licenses that historically go back to Courier 1.3.

If we were required to pay an upgrade fee for Courier 2 at the time it was first made available, we of course would've gladly paid this....But very quickly we would've demanded our money back!

So, here we are now after all this time with a product that still doesnt do the job that Courier 1.3 manages perfectly adequately on our v4 installations (albeit with a core hack).

When Courier becomes stable and reliable it should be bumped to v3 and the team are well within their rights to charge upgrade fees. But it will take some serious end-user confidence boosting first!

Any news on Courier since three weeks ago?

Build 16 of 2.7.8 is the latest but I havent had an opportunity to test it yet, I will very soon!

M.

What can I say, our sites went down and one of the suggestion which we get is uninstal Courier and remove Courier and Nhybernate libraries from bin... We did and it is actually worked. Site is up and running. Now our clients asking us if they should get a refund for the service not provided...

Umbraco 6 is a step up, but if courier will drug Umbraco down should the team revisit entire concept behind Courier-Umbraco relationship?

At the end it is paid add-on.

Well drug it is one way to put it!

@All blonde:

I'm a bit surprised that just having Courier installed should make a site go down as it only uses resources when it either packs or transfer data. Would love to get in touch and get more details (feel free to e-mail me on [email protected])!

@Niels Hartvig:

Should it surprise you that Courier in V6 actually keeps a tap on each transaction happening in admin interface. Even when admin open node list! It was to me when I investigated why does break down happen. SQL server was overwhelmed by sheer amount of transactions. And it does look like lot of connection were opened but never closed. So basically SQL connection pooling was useless because connections were remaining opened until SQL shut those by timing out.  Our sites are pretty visible and tend to attract lot of visitors. And each of those guys does at least 2-3 search/posting/update.

Surprise to see but in first 2 days database tables used by courier grows around 100k+ records per day! And then it get even bigger. That is when we start feeling slows down on the sites responce time and general decreased performance. Lot of errors, Umbraco log files grow up to 700-800+ MB per day from initial 10-15K! I had no choice but disable logging to save pain of adding new space to web servers.

We are using Umbraco since 4.0.0 and I did not see that behavior on V4 and sites on V4 running just fine and Courier work as well  -- compare to V6. We never get it working properly on V6. It messes indexes during transfer. So we do straight database recovery from Staging to Production as a solution to that problem.

Niels, here is some more bad news. When I just uninstalled Courier from QA site (in Developer section): publishing stopped working completely. So we did restore originals and I removed Courier following recommendation from artice http://our.umbraco.org/forum/umbraco-pro/courier/42866-How-to-safely-uninstall-Courier.

It worked! We have no problem in last 48 hours since we did this.

Some info for you to think and investigate why.

Umbraco 6.0.5 with courier release Courier_2.7.8.15.v6.zip.

+1

Unfortunately we're having no end of issues with the new version of courier. We've lodged a bug yesterday where even if you copy a single item, no dependencies and just copy that single node, it tries to transfer a pile of random nodes.

Transferring media items doesn't actually transfer the media file itself.. It has just gone backwards post update.

Hi Tom

Vote up using the buttons to the right ("High five").

Here's my findings after testing 2.7.8 b16...

Anyway I've concluded my testing of Courier 2.7.8 build 16 today....and all I can say is don't waste any more time on it...It's still a sack of crap!

I tested the content picker, checkboxlist and ultimate pickers, my results are...

Content picker -> empty on target,

Checkboxlist -> empty on target and Courier amazingly empties any checked boxes on the source document - amazing and utter shite

Ultimate picker node Id -> inserts GUIDs on target for some reason!

Add to that a UI that's still very ropey...today I noticed if I select target on the first UI screen and then go into advanced settings and select no dependencies, it ignores me and packages all dependencies anyway! Holy Cow!

I've also experienced the UI not always completing background tasks and going blank along with 500 errors being returned to the browser! Why? It was fine in previous builds.

http://our.umbraco.org/forum/umbraco-pro/courier/43585-Bug-with-content-pickers-in-Couriers-latest-version?p=1

Any progress on the state of Courier?

Hey good news this in from Per, obviously I cannot comment on timescales, but this is great news...

"Courier is in the middle of being transitioned to the core dev group so we can have a much tighter control over the data, and the UI, it is a longer process, but dedicated resources have been appointed and work is ongoing."

What does that mean, "transition to the core dev group"?

Just had some strange issues (again) with Courier.

SOAP Service error when transferring items.

Recycled the App Pool and they've now gone.

It does make me a little nervous when we've got new clients who are keen to use Courier in their projects, and I have to make a decision as their experiences will affect their impression of the general Umbraco product and my company.

No doubt there's some good money to be made fixing bad Courier implementations! ;)

-

In a grand scheme of things, I'd hope Courier becomes integrated with Umbraco and eventually (v8) the database is fully re-structured, removing the need for a tool like Courier.

If only the meta-data and content-data could be separated, it would be bliss.

Transition to the core group means: that the core data laver and serializers in the future Will handle all the stuff that couriers own data layer has been doing, and it will be handled by the same debs doing core changes.

This means that core and courier will always be in sync in regards to the dataleyer, and the only thing courier will provide is the ui, depemdemcy detection and transfers.

Also, for the record, Courier does not keep a tab on every transaction in Umbraco, that is simply not possible to hook into. What it does do, is to subscribe to the save and publish events on content, so it can register changes and cache them, it doesnt keep a tab on any other transactions.

Thanks Per for explanation of the future changes in Courier.

On the second part, I would not report that unless I seen that by my own eyes. Courier sent requests to SQL server when admin user just open on the list of nodes one of the Subnodes. And that happened on any/each nodes or subnodes on the site content, developers tools, setting etc.

We trace that using SQL tracing, which means that we did not imagine that. If you did not knew that than here is a bug for you to investigate.We pretty sure that this was a Courier activity because as soon as we removed Courier from the site - it was gone from the tracer.

On that note, will we be able to use newst version of courier for older Umbraco like 4?

For some reason even older versions of Courier degrading and stopped working now.

We have instance of Umbraco 4 with Courier used to work fine until last couple month. We cannot even create package anymore. It is begin working and in the middle of the process shows blank page. It does however create package which cannot be used on target system or source system as well because it does not have something called compare file. Exact error on target system is:

This revision does not have a compare file, so you cannot compare this revion. Re-package the revision to recreate the comparison file

This is what I get even when attempt to package single node...

Also you can see exactly what has been done to get that error on screencast.com/t/b4Gv1l8JB.

I recorded each step attempting to create package for DOCUMENTS (content) only, no macros,data types or anything else which may create an issues.

Thanks.

Some news related to the Concierge remarks we now have a v6 compatible version.

You can get it here http://nightly.umbraco.org/UmbracoConcierge/3.0.0/ (grab the latest)

You should be able to test it without limitations when running on your local system

For full details on Concierge check out http://umbraco.com/products/more-add-ons/concierge.aspx

Concierge project is now also available on our http://our.umbraco.org//projects/umbraco-pro/concierge

Thanks for update Tim,
but this topic was not open for Consierge but rather for Courier problems.
Any update on this matter?

By the way latest Umbraco 6.1.5 have even more problems than 6.0.5. At least that version (605) we could install and work with.

We held such high hopes for promised fixes for Courier issues in 6.1.5. Package 6.1.5 missing files or there is something else. It generated lot of error messages during clean install (brand new instance and blank database) and later on it messes up packages such as Standard MVC web site.
Has anyone looked on package content before it was posted?

Is there anything new to report on Courier progress? I noticed a new build went up (17). But no idea who put it there after it was announced the project was moving to the core team.

Martin.

I think Courier needs to be taken off the Umbraco site. You guys need to stop selling it because obviously it's broken and it doesn't look like it's ever going to work properly on Umbraco 6? Is it even being worked on for this version or are we giving up on it because of Umbraco 7?

Even if it does get fixed at some point in the future, it's misleading and ultimately businesses are actually suffering because official tools are assumed to work, and don't.

It's dangerous and you are going to lose customers over this, and for what? To sell some licenses for a broken product?

It's not good enough to say "sorry, but you're welcome to a refund!"

Are you going to refund us thousands of £££ in wasted hours wrestling with Courier? Rhetorical question!

Hi Zac

I've replied to another post in this section exactly over the issues you've raised. It seems that many aren't aware that Courier is fundamentally broken! But still they try and work with it!

It's a horrible situation with no word on whether anyone is even working on Courier 2.

M.

Hi Martin, I saw your reply. I think that's definitely the worst part - that people are trying to work with this without realising it doesn't work.

We've got major problems now, all because we took the wrong course of action having assumed that this product would work. Was that naive? Yes, it certainly looks naive now. But at the end of the day it's an official product that's pushed from the official website.

Umbraco MUST make a statement and stop selling the product!

Zac,

Cut down on the drama. Courier does work for the majority. Period.

I'm sorry it's not working for you and I can understand that you're frustrated. However, while it may not be the right tool for you and a handful of others in this thread, the majority of Courier customers actually like it. If it was fundamentally flawed and didn't worked, we obviously wouldn't sell.

Kind regards, Niels Hartvig

Niels

Within this thread you eventually acknowledged that there were issues with Courier 2 and Per would be stepping down on day to day development. Since then we've heard nothing!

If you look through the various threads in the Courier section, many state similar issues and have expressed as much frustration about the product as me!

Your statement that Courier works for the majority I feel is unfounded and from build to build since it's release I've found Courier 2 to be extremely unstable and unreliable!

To this day Courier has held us back on upgrading our main sites and we've taken the decision in the last few days to dump Courier 2 altogether and stick with the standard built in workflows and a single build.

If there's one aspect of Umbraco that is without a doubt its' achillies heal!....it's package extensions. We've reached the point where our build has been stripped of everything but Contour! Which we cannot live without.....thank the lord Tim Geyssens has built a solid and, I quote, "well supported package"!

Martin

@martin: I'm not saying that Courier is flawless nor that I didn't wished that everybody loved Courier. But just like with the Umbraco core, people who're frustrated about a tool is often more loud than those who're not.

Internally, Contour and the way Tim has let it the role model for we'll improve Courier. It's just not done in a day.

Cheers, Niels...

Cut down on the drama. Courier does work for the majority. Period.

Perhaps I have been dramatic, but only in order to get someone at HQ to look at this forum again.

I can't say I'm particularly impressed with your response though, even if I have touched a nerve. There are a lot of developers in this forum, many I'm sure more experienced than I, who are talking about many of the same fundamental problems I've experienced. I think your official line is a bit of an insult to the lot of them who continue to struggle with this product. If Courier works acceptably for the majority then I'd assume the majority must not be using Umbraco 6 or are using Courier in very small sites.

Nobody is expecting the solution to happen in a day, but in the mean time you need to at least warn your customers (the developers who are your only supporters) what can and can't be done with Courier before you sell them critical features can't currently be delivered.

Which is why I don't think you should be selling the product, at least not without warnings. Just to echo what others have already said in this thread, this isn't a pricing issue - if you need to change your prices or business model, by all means.

Otherwise, say goodbye to your developers that are pushing Umbraco for global websites or bigger clients.

@Zac

If you flick through my comments in this thread you'll find I've not found any datatype issues with Courier 2 (2.7.3). The bug Per fixed has regressed in later builds DOH!!!

So download an older version, although bare in mind the older versions also have their own "unique" set of issues! sigh!

M.

To be honest, my experience has been that Courier has flaws that do not seem related to some 'special' way of using it or Umbraco. E.g. on a clean, local install of Umbraco I could (in the past, haven't used it in some months) easily reproduce issues like not being able to select templates for packaging, or re-packaging of exact same selection resulting in different package contents.

I believe Niels if he says most customers are happy, but I cannot figure out what makes us an unfortunate customer, it's not like our servers are running upside down in zero gravity :-)

@Michiel

LMAO! Maybe your servers do run upside down in zero gravity, have you checked?

Joking aside, I've tried too many builds of Courier to mention in very simple and very complex sites and experienced the same problems each time.

To be more specific...

Very simple sites built fresh with Courier 2 added from the start and very complex sites which have gone through continual upgrades and package extension changes with Courier 2 added after uninstalling Courier 1.3.

So I'm also at a loss as to how the "majority" can be happy customers!?!

M.

Guys,

Using latest courier with umbraco 4.11.7 all works fine. We have only had one intermittant issue for some reason every now and then we get not licensed error, so have to restart the app pool and that fixes the problem. We regularly courier content,css,images, macros and templates.

Regards

Ismail

Hi Ismail

Can you be specific as to what you consider the "latest version"? Do you mean 2.7.8 b15 which is punted in the downloads section or do you mean b16 or b17?

I tested b16 and found it was failing to link up id's in various datatypes, as mentioned by others in this thread.

M.

@Ismail, do you "right click, courier transfer" or "create revision, package, transfer, deploy"? In my experience the first works quite well, the second is where we've experienced most of our problems, especially with the packaging step.

I'll be completely frank about my experiences:

1. Courier works for Content
2. Some of our courier instances do not Courier media (always misses the file)

3. So we only use Courier for content

4. Any database changes are made manually or via uSync, none of our clients have access to the settings or developer tab. I'm happy with this, I'd rather Courier just shipped content. It's a tool for content editors.

5. I've found Courier works nicely for Content providing: a.) you ship one thing at a time, step by step. b.) you never ship dependancies, you just ship the current item.

6. The biggest win for me, but more importantly my content editors would be.....

Menu Context Item 'Courier this page'.

This would only courier the selected page, and remove the process of having to uncheck the dependancies checkbox and selecting 'advanced' each time a page is Couriered.

-

I'm starting to use a iSCSI share for our staging and live environments, so the media issue isn't really a problem.

-

p.s my main frustration with Courier is when it breaks, it's a bit of a nightmare to work out why it's broken! But it is what it is.

@Laurence I'm happy you posted this workflow for the world to see.

I wholeheartily agree.  

I'd also note, that without Courier, Umbraco would not be viable option for two of my clients. So, without it, I wouldn't be building Umbraco, I'd be building something else Ektron, etc, etc, etc. LAu

Our company pretty much depends on Courier for our Content deployments.
Courier basically has turned Umbraco into a dirty word at this company.

@michiel,

Correct we use right click transfer as we have purchased cut down version so cannot do revisions even if we wanted to.

@martin, I just pulled down version from our and then installed the license file.

Regards

Ismail

Laurence, Christopher, what versions of Umbraco are you using?

As you say Laurence, I've had some intermittent success shipping items one-by-one without dependencies. I think I'm experiencing a few different issues that are compounding into a problem that is very difficult to diagnose.

Courier_2.7.8.15.v6
Umbraco 6.1.6

Current issues Dropdown List and Radio Button  content won't package into courier.
(There is actualy nothing in the nodes in the actual packages) 

Datatypes will pacakge and the Id's change from Environment to enviroment.

Seems this Core Umbraco stuff should of been fixed eons ago.

Why spend money creating New flashy interfaces when core functionality issues still remain.

@Christopher

The issues are specific to Courier not Umbraco. Courier is handling translation of Id's not Umbraco.

That's what this thread is about Courier is letting Umbraco down!!!

Sorry Chris

I'm probably getting messed up with your use of "Core Umbraco stuff" and the Umbraco core!

But you're right it is fundamental stuff that should work out of the box, regardless of whether you're making a package or right-click transferring.

M.

I agree that they need to stop selling it or clearly layout what's working, what's not, and for what versions.

Not only did our company waste the money, but lost weeks of developer time trying to make it work. 

We gave up on it months ago. 

IMHO, to say that those in this situation are being "dramatic" is offensive and shows a disconnect with those of us who have clients to deal with. 

I'm not sure this thread is going to lead to anything productive, so this will most likely be my last post here.

-

If you are careful Courier will work. If you know these few things up front, you life will be much easier.

1. Avoid using ID's

XPATH is your friend.
Get me data from ID = $currentPage/ancestor-or-self::Home

Using XPATHS will make your life much easier, balanced and in harmony.
(oddly enough the same applies to CSS, each thing on the page doesn't need it own class or id!, but that's another story)

Using XPaths will make your code easier to reuse. If you are using macros, don't hard code ID's. Set them as a parameter, and then pass the correct value in using the Umbraco short codes (hash, dollar, etc, see marco paramaterisation in the git documents)

2. Use Content to drive datatypes where possible.

For example if you have a collection of colours, make a folder that contains colours, and point a MNTP at it.
Again this makes differences in ID's less risky, you could even match on name.
I never use the Umbraco - dropdown, checkbox, radio options.

Example of simple datatypes - http://screencast.com/t/xavNASamd45a

3. Workflow

Courier from STAGING to LIVE = YES
Courier from LIVE to STAGING = NO

Create content on STAGING = YES
Create content on LIVE = NEVER

Delete the Umbraco folder from your LIVE environment, if you create content here, your world will come tumbling down.

4. Only deploy content

Use uSync or manually deploy document type changes.
If you are making document type changes regularly, your architecture isn't right.
If you have a website with lots of content editors, you should probally best testing any major changes in a DEV environment before STAGING.
E.g DEV -> UAT -> STAGING -> LIVE

5. Trust your content editors. Let them deploy content.

Oh but they might break it, trust them :-) at least they'll them learn what works and what doesn't.

6. As Michel Thomas says "Step by Step!"

1. Right click and select 'Courier'
2. Uncheck 'Yes, transfer all children as well'
3. Next click 'Go to advanced settings" (bottom right)
4. Change transfer to "Selected items only"
5. Click 'Continue'
6. There will be several more screens asking for confirmation, continue to click 'Continue'
7. Once the content has been transferred you will receive a 'Extracting page, was completed successfully message"

7. Your development environment

Configure a couple of instances so you can occasionally test whilst your building the site. It's easier to fix when there's less things going on! ;)

8. When Courier works, it works!

My biggest frustration with Courier is when there's a problem. Because the error messages are non existent, it's a very slow step by step process to identify the underlying cause of the issue. I think this frustration is quite clear on the forum here. Have fun! Bye! Lau

9. When Courier is broken...

1. Do you have a license file present? Is the license valid for your domain?
2. Check the webserver can access the other Umbraco instance (ping from the server)
3. Is the address the webserver is configured to talk to licensed?

Edited 28th November

Hi all

Sterling advice from Laurence, I agree his advice is sound.

It does however, make a mockery of Courier 2's original intent and thats to be a useful deployment tool for developers as well as end users!

At the beginning of this thread I argued Courier 2 should be dumped and Courier 1 ressurrected because it actually does serve the purpose of a perfectly adequate deployment tool for content editors. Whilst in contrast Courier 2's UI is much more complicated than needed for end users!

Its clear Courier 2's ability to act as a site packaging mechanism for deployment is flawed and cannot be trusted, which is real shame and basically (compared to it's predecessor) it's unique selling point!

So if you can get accept it's practical use is no further on than Courier 1, albeit compatible with U6 then....continue to use it!

For us we've all but given up on it!

M.

I don't think the complaints on here are dramatic at all. I recently recommended Courier to a client of mine, it mangled their site pretty badly. Luckily we had backups but it's left them with no viable solution of deployment and a little dent in my reputation (so I won't be recommending Courier again).

Courier is closed-source right? If not, could someone point me towards the source-code so I can have a look (and possibly find out what's going wrong in our scenario). The thought of manually transfering 200 documents by hand does not fill me with joy.

Closed source i'm afraid!

+1
Last 2 weeks i update a installation from Umbraco 4.0 to Umbraco 6 (because of problems with courier) by copy all media and content manual into a complete fresh installation.

Then install courier (try all nightly builds) an try to transfer to the fresh installation on the productiv server ...

Courier Revision brings errors, Courier lost links, Courier lost media or don't create folder etc. ... frustrating...very poor (4 Days of work)

It is time to think about a complete new creation of courier. Don't make it to complicated. Something like automatic Export / Import mechanism is enough to bring content to the productiv server. They way EyeCatch CSV Export and CMSImport make it...or just implement a backup / restore function to bring it on stage.

Greetings from germany,
Ulrich

@Ulrich! Das Ist Nact Gute!

Courier is a tricky app. My advise to you is start thinking about Umbraco a little differently.

#1. Use Usync to sync your Datatypes, Doctypes, Mediatypes & Macros

• Creates a file representation of Database that is easy to move across environments

Well, it's getting on for a year since Neils told us "Courier works, period", so time for a bump.

Does anybody have any good news for what the future holds for Courier or official Courier-esque tools? Perhaps I missed some good news, as I haven't noticed anything in the roadmaps.

Umbraco is the best CMS I've ever worked with, but supporting complicated global Umbraco instances is still pretty heavy duty and terrifying with no content staging for major development, or new countries that need to come online etc.

Hi Zac

Thought i'd touch base...

The unreliable nature of courier was really damaging what our marketing dept. thought of Umbraco as a product as they only see it as a whole. So we decided to take drastic steps to fix this dim view.

We put foward a proposal to dump staging and courier altogether on all of our sites and understandably we received a lot of resistence. Thankfully upon pointing out what marketing were already doing as writers & editors, it was concluded to be enough for their purposes. The simple send to publish -> save and publish workflow process built in to umbraco means that we continue to keep site changes hidden by writers until validated by more senior editors. Email notifications are sent to editors showing the changes as they happen, which can be accepted or rejected. We also setup a very restricted user that could be used by anyone in the business to preview changes proposed by writers prior to them being published by the more senior editors.

Upon taking staging builds down from our servers, it immediately halved our workload. Less backups and less stress keeping things in sync! We do continue to maintain a staging environment internally but it's purely for the purpose of testing development changes and demoing them to the business. Marketing do not have back office access to these builds.

We now use a nuGet build of Umbraco in combination with localDB/IISExpress/VS2013 & TFS; this makes testing, updating and publishing builds much, much easier! We've also seperated out the media section into a seperate virtual directory to allow the entire site to be re-published (deleted) if necessary. That only leaves config differences as the final headache, especially on nuGet updates!

We sync development changes to live with uSync, but we manually re-link templates because there's masterpage/view duplication issues in Umbraco 6.x. But we've seen this fixed in 7.x. This final gizmo releases us from needing Courier altogether.

Regards

Martin.

Hi Zac

On a slightly seperate issue...

We've concluded the only way we can consistently stay up-to-date with Umbraco (major and minor revisions), is to keep package extensions to an absolute minimum and where possible extend Umbraco ourselves.

So we've whittled our packages down to Umbraco Contour and uSync. We continue to use FAMFAMFAM Icons, but there's no dependency in Umbraco 6 for those. Media Icons has proven useful in 6, but it will also be dumped when we move our main sites to Umbraco 7as there's no update for this.

And thats the problem....the APIs in Umbraco change so much and so frequently, many developers often give up updating their packages without any commercial gain!

M.

is working on a reply...