I’ll be up-front here and say my experience with DNN was none prior to taking my current job, is probably slightly above elementary now, but is rapidly growing. So that being said, go easy on me if I’m bringing up a topics that has already been covered. (I’ve have spent extensive amounts of time reading through the forums looking for solutions…I swear!!)

 

To the point of this post; I have and would like to maintain a Development, Certification/pre-production and Production environment with a smooth and well documented migration process. As of right now it looks like this, Dev and Cert are hosted on one box, under the same DNN install. This is accomplished by having two portals, DevAppNamePortal and CertAppNamePortal. Production is on a second production box. Development will truly be a testing and development environment. It will never be migrated into Cert as a whole, only bits and pieces. Once I’ve tested a module or whatever to my liking I’ll recreate it and put it where I want it in Cert. Once it has been tested and “certified” as working it will be migrated to production during a change window. Using this process you can see how it’s crucial that I take an exact copy of Cert and apply to Prod. Currently the person in charge of our web presence (and DNN by circumstance not choice) has encouraged me to export the content of each individual module, then use the import which means I basically recreate the entire site. This is time consuming and error prone considering the limitations of the export/import tool. There are too many opportunities for me to over look a setting or flat out miss something.

 

It seems that there would be others out there who have solid, real-world experience with this same or similar configuration. (and if you’re not using separate environments for development and production data, please let me know where you work because I’ll be applying for your job after some random change you’re testing wrecks your site and the boss/client flips…haha!)

 

The only idea I’ve come up with (have not tried/tested) would be to do a complete backup of my Cert portal then restore it as the Prod portal. I can already see a couple short comings with this process, but lacking another solution I may be stuck trying to make it work. In a more, I’ll call it traditional setup I’d just copy the site, change any Cert references to Prod, drop the site into production then go have a cold beer because my work is done…

I don’t see how I can do that using DNN but hopeful there is something that will help me.

 

Thanks for your help.

 

-r