Hi Dave, In terms of managing multiple environments (ie, Dev, Stage and Production), it can be a little tricky with RedDot. A good documentation process for your changes is always going to help (so you know what to change), but there are a few tips that I've found over the years:
Personally I think assets like CSS / JS are good to keep in the file system and implement as virtual directories. This way you can keep them in the source control repository of choice and use branches / tags / whatever to keep track of which files should go to which environment. You can even implement continuous integration if you want to. I've personally found that trying to manage javascript / css "files" as RedDot templates (and hence pages) produces a lot of extra work, not to mention has unexpected consequences within RedDot. In terms of CMS content, this is more difficult. When you're migrating an entire project from one environment to another (such as when you're doing your first deployment to staging or production), it's fairly straightforward to export the entire project and import it into a new server (or as a copy into the same server). I have to admit I haven't seen the sync tool that Hilmar suggested above, but RedDot has an API called "RQL" (RedDot Query Language) and with this, you can actually query which templates a project has, what elements are in each template and so on. You can even get the template mark-up. I've written a script in the past that used this interface to analyse about 50 projects on a RedDot instance and show a comparison between the templates of them all. It was really useful for figuring out where some projects had been modified while others hadn't. Theoretically you could extend this to actually move changes from one environment to another too, but I haven't done this. The other (much more manual) process for deploying template changes between environments is to use the Template export feature (which exports the template as a text file to your local machine). If you export a template from one environment then the same template from your other environment, a quick text compare will show you exactly what's different between them. In the past I've used a tool like Beyond Compare to check an entire folder trees' worth of template files and flag up the differences. Unfortunately there's no way of exporting all of the templates for a given project (that I've seen), but it certainly would be possible to make a plugin to do so. So I'm sorry this isn't all good news. I hope this hasn't put you off too much :) Cheers, Mark On Thursday, 4 June 2015 11:03:23 UTC+1, David Hutson wrote: > > Hi Hilmar, > > Thanks for the reply, this is really interesting and could form a possible > solution. I would love to know if you have any experience of managing > changes across a dev, staging , production setup? > > All the best > > Dave > > On Tuesday, 2 June 2015 16:04:58 UTC+1, Hilmar Bunjes wrote: >> >> Hi Dave, >> the templates in the CMS as well as the pages have an internal versioning >> in the CMS itself. This is most often used in development. There is no >> built in moving changes from one system to another but there are external >> tools like http://www.erminas.de/en/web/products/cms-sync-tool.html that >> make it possible to move changes to attributes, elements, and single lines >> in templates e.g. from development to testing or production. >> >> The CSS/JS and additional external files are different. Some users keep >> them in the CMS to have a single point for the project where all files are. >> This could be either a template (including versioning) or a file in the >> file system / asset folder. Others keep those files at an external place >> like a git repository and move them manually or by any automatism to the >> servers that deliver the content. >> >> HTH as a little overview. Please feel free to ask anything in addition. >> As you are new to the CMS and are familiar with .NET development maybe the >> SmartAPI (http://www.smartapi.de/en/homepage/) for programmatic access >> to the CMS could be interesting for you as well. >> >> Best, >> Hilmar >> >> >> On Monday, June 1, 2015 at 5:22:20 PM UTC+2, David Hutson wrote: >>> >>> Hi Everyone, >>> >>> I am a complete newbie to Reddot Cms but I would like to find out how >>> people manage source control / release management with Reddot Cms. I have >>> inherited a site in version 11.1 and I am use to managing changes with git >>> and nuget packaged deployments and powershell. I would appreciate any >>> advice on how people control and deploy changes. I'm hoping that there is >>> maybe a commandline way of packaging up changes to then deploy to another >>> instance. >>> >>> thanks >>> >>> Dave >>> >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RedDot CMS Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to reddot-cms-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to reddot-cms-users@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/reddot-cms-users. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
