We’ve started to put the Deployment tools to good use and it has been amazing to be able to deploy between instances. This is a great foundation. We’ve collected a few feature requests that I’ll include below:
Compare page display improvements
- Be able to show at least 5 columns in the compare page. Currently, we have to pick our favorite column, but often we need more information than a single column can present. A case for all four columns is for EcomProducts (yes, I realize that we typically wouldn’t use the deployment tool for products, but we do when the site first starts off and only has some test data). For EcomProducts, we want to see ProductID, ProductLanguageID, ProductVariantID, ProductNumber, ProductName. We could possibly get away with less, but it would be handy to see all of this at once. This is just one example.
- Another example that is slightly different is the Page. Just the name isn’t enough sometimes. It would be nice to see where it lives in the content tree.
- It would be amazing to be able to reference a foreign key along with its friendly name. For example, EcomProductCategoryTranslation (there are lots of other situations). This table in itself doesn’t have enough information to identify it. It would be nice for this to make a foreign key call to get the friendly name. Another example is for a paragraph to show which page it belongs to (although I’ll mention another idea below about the Page and Paragraph providers)
- Sorting the columns would be helpful.
- Filtering: Be able to filter the results to just those that are different, or just those on the right or those on the left. Otherwise, the list starts to get very long in some situations.
- Additionally for Filtering. It would be great to allow the providers to support include or exclude of data, like having pages opted out so that they can't be deployed by mistake. This is useful to have a quick deployment of just safe objects available to deploy.
Providers:
- It would be nice to have an ItemType provider that includes both the XML and the database schema updates. We can’t easily do the database part with the database provider because new tables are created for each item type and we have to create an object for every item type that we want to sync.
- The Pages and Paragraphs providers could use some updates to include more settings. One example is the layout settings in the paragraph provider. I don’t have a list handy that includes the missing fields, but it would be good to have an audit of missing settings and have them added.
- It would be nice for the Page and Paragraph providers to be closely related. In particular:
- Be able to deploy a page and all paragraphs at once
- When viewing a paragraph on the compare page, be able to tell which page it belongs to
- File provider. Be able to exclude folders, like the Parsed folder.
- Additional setting providers. It would be nice to have setting providers for:
- ItemTypes. We will often change a single setting and we want to be able to deploy just that setting and not the entire item type.
- Very low priority, but the same could be for pages and paragraphs. In the future, we want to be able to make a single change and only deploy the one change.
General
- It would be nice to support mismatch versions. Often our dev, QA, UAT, and Production platform versions update at different times. As long as the deployment functionality doesn’t change, it would be nice to still support deploying. Maybe you could have a version check on new features so that if a new feature is used, it would prevent deploying, but if no deployment functionality has changed, then allow deploying between different versions.
- CLI or some sort of solution that is compatible with GitHub. We would like to have a way to check in setting changes to GitHub, along with the code changes, and be able to have other developers do a pull and be able to run the deployment script on their dev machine, to get the settings. The other use case is for a CI solution where we could automate the deployment to QA and then production. One option would be to run the deploy step, but store the deployment package, and it may almost work now. But, it would be nice to have some tools built to make this standard supported functionality.
Thanks!
Scott
