I would like a little advice on the best way to develop and deploy Umbraco. There are many posts on this subject, but none seem to answer my particular questions, so I thought it might be best to ask here and see if anybody can point me in the right direction.
So... until now, I have always written my own websites from scratch using classic ASP. (I'll give you a little while to stop laughing...)
I figured it was time to move into this century and, after researching a few CMS I found Umbraco, and I like what I've learned so far.
The problem I'm having, is how to efficiently develop an Umbraco site on my laptop and then 'publish' online.
In the past, my workflow would be:
Lock the live site so user(s) can't make any changes
Download the site files + DB to my laptop so I have an up-to-date version of the site locally
Work on the requested changes until complete
Take down the site, upload the new files and database then bring the site back up.
I've tried something similar with Umbraco, but it's a hugely complected, time-consuming task.
Here are some issues in this approach:
I can't 'lock' the live site to prevent changes while I develop.
Umbraco site seems to have thousands of files (do I need to download / upload the lot??).
Where I used to just leave a connection file (for DB connection string / email configs etc.) I now have to edit the web.config file each time
I can't find a graceful way of taking the site down while I upload the changes
Am I going about this the wrong way? I discovered Umbraco Courier which looks like it might handle moving content to and fro, but it seems like overkill for the size of sites I work on.
Any advice on this topic would be appreciated, thanks.
I'm a little new to Umbraco myself. It sounds like you might want to use a source control system like Git to manage downloading and creating a local repository then re-integrating. This may help you having to avoid 'locking' the site. Don't know if this is overkill however based on your comments. You don't need to Publish the site either. You can take the whole lot down and put back up. I hope this helps.
Developing Umbraco site locally
Hi all,
I would like a little advice on the best way to develop and deploy Umbraco. There are many posts on this subject, but none seem to answer my particular questions, so I thought it might be best to ask here and see if anybody can point me in the right direction.
So... until now, I have always written my own websites from scratch using classic ASP. (I'll give you a little while to stop laughing...) I figured it was time to move into this century and, after researching a few CMS I found Umbraco, and I like what I've learned so far.
The problem I'm having, is how to efficiently develop an Umbraco site on my laptop and then 'publish' online. In the past, my workflow would be:
I've tried something similar with Umbraco, but it's a hugely complected, time-consuming task.
Here are some issues in this approach:
Am I going about this the wrong way? I discovered Umbraco Courier which looks like it might handle moving content to and fro, but it seems like overkill for the size of sites I work on.
Any advice on this topic would be appreciated, thanks.
Hi Steve,
I'm a little new to Umbraco myself. It sounds like you might want to use a source control system like Git to manage downloading and creating a local repository then re-integrating. This may help you having to avoid 'locking' the site. Don't know if this is overkill however based on your comments. You don't need to Publish the site either. You can take the whole lot down and put back up. I hope this helps.
Dom
is working on a reply...