We're working on a team project with Umbraco and have run into concerns about multiple work on the same items.
Firstly, there appears to be no concurrency locking. So if two developers open the same page, then one saves, then the second one overwrites the changes made by the first. Basic concurrency would be to give an error message to the 2nd saver. Can you confirm if any of this behaviour is in place?
Secondly, we're a bit confused as to why content is being saved in the database and how this relates to sharing and caching content? We seem to be running into caching issues where one developer is making changes and another developer is not getting these changes. We're sharing the same database and then checking the file-based content in and out of a SVN repository.
Umbraco saves content to the database but the site pulls it's data from a in memory xml file, this is the 'umbraco.config' xml file within the App_Data folder, this file gets recreated on a publish, hence why your website content might not be in sync (if one user has not published then the umbraco.config file will be out of date).
You can set Umbraco to run in a web farm situation which means the content does get synced, not sure if this is useful to you.
Umbraco 5 when released is likely to work better in a shared Dev environment, with the current version I don't think anyone as found a 'perfect' shared dev set up but it's certainly workable.
I think the problems we were experiencing with caching related to editing templates, which falls outside the publishing process, from what I understand. Basically we set up two PC's and the changes saved on a template on one side were not predictably coming through to the other side, making us very nervous obviously.
What is the best recommended work practice to minimise these issues?
Templates can either be edited in the Umbraco interface or via directly editing the files (they are just master pages).
There is no template caching, but you may be experiencing problems as the templates are held it 2 places, the physical file and in the database.
Again you would need to ensure that were copied to SVN in sync.
I'm not 100% sure when/how the updates on the templates happen (for example if the physical file gets edited when does Umbraco pick this up and put the changes in the db).
As I've said team development in Umbraco is tricky and there's no perfect solution but there will be a way to get the templates synced, there are no 'intermitent' problems with template caching at all.
Concurrency and edit locking?
We're working on a team project with Umbraco and have run into concerns about multiple work on the same items.
Firstly, there appears to be no concurrency locking. So if two developers open the same page, then one saves, then the second one overwrites the changes made by the first. Basic concurrency would be to give an error message to the 2nd saver. Can you confirm if any of this behaviour is in place?
Secondly, we're a bit confused as to why content is being saved in the database and how this relates to sharing and caching content? We seem to be running into caching issues where one developer is making changes and another developer is not getting these changes. We're sharing the same database and then checking the file-based content in and out of a SVN repository.
Could you shed light on these two issues?
Hey Savage,
There is no concurrency locking at the moment with Umbraco, however you can add this with the http://umbraco.com/products/more-add-ons/concierge
Umbraco saves content to the database but the site pulls it's data from a in memory xml file, this is the 'umbraco.config' xml file within the App_Data folder, this file gets recreated on a publish, hence why your website content might not be in sync (if one user has not published then the umbraco.config file will be out of date).
You can set Umbraco to run in a web farm situation which means the content does get synced, not sure if this is useful to you.
Umbraco 5 when released is likely to work better in a shared Dev environment, with the current version I don't think anyone as found a 'perfect' shared dev set up but it's certainly workable.
Rich
Thanks Rich.
I think the problems we were experiencing with caching related to editing templates, which falls outside the publishing process, from what I understand. Basically we set up two PC's and the changes saved on a template on one side were not predictably coming through to the other side, making us very nervous obviously.
What is the best recommended work practice to minimise these issues?
Hi,
Templates can either be edited in the Umbraco interface or via directly editing the files (they are just master pages).
There is no template caching, but you may be experiencing problems as the templates are held it 2 places, the physical file and in the database.
Again you would need to ensure that were copied to SVN in sync.
I'm not 100% sure when/how the updates on the templates happen (for example if the physical file gets edited when does Umbraco pick this up and put the changes in the db).
As I've said team development in Umbraco is tricky and there's no perfect solution but there will be a way to get the templates synced, there are no 'intermitent' problems with template caching at all.
Courier may help and you can see a video here on team development http://codegarden11.com/sessions/day-2/slot-two/team-development-with-andor-without-courier-20.aspx
Regards
Rich
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