Thread

Greetings,

I am attempting to convince a client of mine to utilize EE for an upcoming site reworking (not redesign, we’re simply looking to change/upgrade our CMS as it currently is using Drupal 5). One of the biggest hurdles we’re currently having is the transition from development environments to production.

Note that this isn’t what I would consider a “typical” development to live transition. This is a fairly large organization with regular content updates to news feeds, blog posts and “resources” occurring by other authors, editors and contributors on the live server all the time. Any time we would need to migrate from development to production must take into account the database on production is likely a number of updates ahead of our development server. Essentially - no straight DB dumps allowed.

In Drupal this poses a tremendous issue as all content is stored as a node on the database - including template updates. Obviously EE doesn’t suffer from the same problems, but it still, from what I can see, is a challenge. What would be the best strategy to push updates to an active, continuously updated live server?

Just giving this a bump now that its Monday morning. Any thoughts or perspectives would be welcome!

I would suggest a few things.

1) Work on one server that includes a workflow. So that all content/post are in “draft” or “review” states. Then when it’s ready to go live, change the state to “publish”.

2) If you have to separate the servers, then I would suggest a DB dump… or just change the DB connection to swap from dev to prod. Then dev would need to copy prod’s DB data… and the cycle restarts.

3) Engineers and Ops should have access to dev servers. But content writers should be able to use prod with a workflow in place.

So I think the solution isn’t a question of CMS, but a defined workflow. Let me know if you have questions.

Rob

Welcome to the ExpressionEngine forums, James. Just a quick note to thank you for your purchase, and hope you’re enjoying working with EE.

Since you’re new to the EE forums, have you seen EEWiki:// How to Post a Support Request?

James, you may not be aware of this, but we work in a first in first out queue. Each time you bump a post, or someone responds, that post goes to the bottom of the queue, and won’t be seen by us in a timely manner. I apologize for that, we’re trying to upgrade our processes to improve the work flow.

Thanks for the assist, Robert.

I agree, any workflow for doing dev to prod releases can be a problem. But it depends on what you’re changing.

For instance, if your dev process is strictly to test new releases and to work on templates, then saving templates as files would be a way of not needing to fiddle with channel entries.