Anyone willing to share site rollout procedures and best practice?

#1

Hey guys,

It’s coming up to the time where we are going up replace designs, paint layouts and schemas to some major areas to our site.


As designs and paint layouts are changes that cannot be applied in safe edit was just wondering in anyone was willing to share their strategies to prevent a disaster!


Generally we just lower the cache to 15 minutes and make the changes required during a maintenance window.


Which order is the best?


Apply new schemas,

Apply new design then paint layouts

Remove older schemas


Cheers

Fuzz

(Tbaatar) #2

I don't know how the site is built but from what I gather your adding new metadata schema's, and this is printed with the new design/paint layout.

 

If so, the steps looks correct.

#3

Thanks so much!

(Anthony Barnes) #4

If you are very risk adverse you could freeze editing on the production system, perform these changes on a copy of the system, UAT it then swap it out with the production copy. In doing your change on a copy you can be sure that nothing changes on the live/public system until you are 100% happy. We have some systems we use in our cloud to automate this, although it's also possible to do it manually.

 

If you really need to make the changes to the production system then what you have suggested sounds reasonable. There will still be a period where visitors can see mixed old/new content though, particularly if you have a high traffic website. If it's going to be a real problem having visitors browse the site while a large change is underway it may also be possible to temporarily redirect to a maintenance page until the change is done. If the redirect is sending the right code & content then it will be ignored by search crawlers and proxy cache and it'll prevent users from seeing something you don't want them to... but that also removes the ability to access the content.

#5

Thanks so much Anthony for your advise. Our first thought on a major site is to redirect the site to our sorry service page while the changes filtered down. In the worst case we have used very similar IDs between the templates so hopefully it won’t be too hideous if there is mixed template views. We don’t don’t have enough hours for a copy but this might be something that could be worthwhile for our homepage and courses to kill two birds with one stone. I will suggest this to the team.