Hello,
I have been working with dynamicweb for about a year on a daily basis. In our department we are usually doing adjustments according to the customer's needs directly on the server via an FTP access. As some of you can imagine, this isn't very efficient as you litreally have no version control and your changes overwrites the existing code at once.
I know it is possible to hook up any folder or files for that matter to a version control and keep it synched in house in a local environment. However, I am missing the link from a local development environment to the actual live site. The process of the following scenario is missing some essential documentation or best practices:
1) You get a task/case on modifying an existing template and creating a new template a specific module (could be anything, really.)
2) As the good developer you are, you know that modifying templates etc. directly on the server is a bad thing!
3) You start up your local version of the live site, which you hooked up with your IIS/Visual Studio and make the changes.
4) Changes are made and you are about to deploy to the live site...
5) As I see it, you are pretty much in no-mans land here. I know it is possible to webdeploy files such as templates, however as I recall dynamicweb saves a lot of data on on its database, which means the you have a data migration issue/task to do here as well.
What to do? - I am pretty sure me/my department isn't the only ones who have given the above mentioned scenario a thought. As I have worked on multiple CMS systems I know that there isn't the perfect way of deploying really. I recall messy stuff as well when working with Umbraco, but still we had a routine which we unfortunately cannot implement to our dynamicweb.
So, do you guys have any ideas, thoughts or even routines you would like to share on the subject?.
As I see the huge issue is the synchronization of the databases -> as pushing templates files etc is pretty straight forward :)
Have a nice weekend
Regards,
MikkelTO
