I am trying to get an answer to a question (http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/F...) but haven't heard back. It could be because my title is less than obvious so I am creating new thread with a better title. This is a potential showstopper for us in considering DNN (we are thinking about the Professional edition) so I am really eager to understand how this works.

In short, I will be maintaining a development server and a production server. Beyond in the INIITIAL deployment (I already have an answer for that) I need to be able to develop/test on the development server and roll those changes into production. My initial research (which may be mistaken) suggests that this is not easy. I have seen a few threads about this that generally get a response about the initial deployment but nothing about incremental changes. I also see a feature of the Entreprise edition that seems to speak to this scenario but that edition is way out of our price range.

I am REALLY hoping that the common scenario of making changes on a development server and then rolling them into production once tested is not just an Enterprise edition feature. As I say, that would be a showstopper to us but I am hopeful that the scenario is such an obvious/common one that I am simple misinterpreting what I am reading.

Anyway, if I can get to the point where I know I can easily release updates to our site from the developer machine to production then I am pretty much ready to roll with a Professional purchase. Without that - well, DNN probably isn't going to work for us, regretfully.

Thanks.

Mark

Thank you, Chris. I appreciate the response. I'm trying to wrap my head around just how much work is involved in each of these. A classic example might be rolling out a new section of a site with, say, some back end logic, a handful of pages, etc, etc. I don't understand the underlying DNN architecture well enough to understand which of the options below would work best.

For example, if I went with the backup/restore approach am I not restoring not just over my "content model" (pages, etc) but also any operational data that may have been collected on the production site (click-through data, password changes by users, etc, etc).

I am also concerned I am missing a bigger picture here. Take Professional edition for example. As a $2,500 product it's obviously not for someone just tinkering around with a personal site. It's aimed at and used by "professionals" who have mission critical sites to develop and maintain. In the typical case, does that professional really just make changes directly against the production server (no testing, review process, etc)? And if s/he does have a development server which of the non-Enterprise solutions you describe is the best bet.

The bit I think I am missing is why this is not a common scenario :-) Very interested in understanding the how folks with mission-critical Professional sites manage change in their environment.

Thanks again.

Mark

Thak you, Sebastian. So let me see if I have this straight.

• If I am creating new pages on my site I just restrict visibility (rights for all users) until I am ready to roll them out.
• If I am making tweaks to an existing page then I can either
  • Make them directly on the live site on which case they are immediately live or
  • Make them on the dev server and then cut/paste across to the production server when I am done
• If the change can be neatly contained within a module then I can
  • Make the change on the live server but restrict visibility of the module to developers/designers until I am ready to roll out to all users or
  • Develop the module on the development server and then package for deployment (and integrate to the target page) when ready

Two areas I'd like read more about (any pointers to specify documentation) are:

• What I'd need to know to merge data from a development site onto a production server without overwriting key data*
• Packaging modules for deployment

* My concern here is that I don't understand what other data DNN maintains in its database (clickthroughs, user profiles, etc). Is there a neat little document I can read somewhere that describes how I can merge content between databases without impacting operational or security data?

Thanks again - very helpful.

Mark