We're currently thinking of a better way to support the development cycle within FirstSpirit projects. For bigger projects it's essential to have at least a development and a productive environment, most of them use a quality-assurance environment for testing purposes as well.
Template developers can use the "create update"/"install update" functionality to transport new or changed templates from their development system to the quality-assurance and/or productive system, but it's limited to templates only. Content has to be transferred manually, which is a error prone process.
Our idea is to enhance the "template update" functionality to allow the developer to put a complete "feature" into a package. A feature could contain:
- templates
- pages/folders (content)
- page references and menu folders (structure)
- media files (media store)
- global content
- project settings
- data records (content store)
This feature package could be imported into another FirstSpirit project, which can reside on a different server.
- Existing objects will be overwritten (similar to the current template update)
- Import won't be possible if some dependencies are missing. Example: Your package does contain a page but the target project doesn't have the necessary page template. Import would be possible if the package contains the page template as well.
- We're not planning to implement a push or pull mechanism to transfer feature packages from one system to another. The developer will be able download a "zip-file" that he can import on a different system.
Do you think that such a feature would be helpful? Any additional suggestions regarding this topic?
