Research & Development for 3D & the Web

Packaging Sitecore Content to move from one site to another

A typical web development environment has multiple versions of the same website running concurrently. This will at least be a local version and a live or staging (or both) version of the site. In the case where you make some changes locally to be tested, often you’ll wind up with a fair bit of time spent on something which is on the local site and needs to be pushed live and may or may not need to be replicated in order to do so depending on whether or not a full re-deploy is an option (definitely not for a live website).

This sort of situation is where I think Sitecore is quite brilliant. In the Developer tools there is the Package Designer area.

 

 

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here you can browse through your site and select the item (and its sub-items if you wish) using the ‘add’ options below. I’ve chosen ‘Items Statically’ to do this for Sitecore items, but there are Files Statically, Items and Files Dynamically as well. There also looks to be a Security Accounts one which I’ve not yet fully investigated.

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 

Continue to add all of the Sitecore content items which you need and then you can ‘package’ it up using the ‘Generate ZIP’ option. This lets you save the items to a zip file which can be installed using the install wizard in Sitecore. The install wizard is located in the same area (easiest place to find it). It’s an option named ‘Launch Wizard’.

By default the package designer will save the packages to a folder in your Sitecore file system under the Data folder – I think it’s called packages or something along those lines. If you get an error message, there’s a good chance you need to create this directory yourself so it can be saved to the folder. The alternative is to click the very small ‘download’ icon right after you finish making the zip which lets you save it to the location of your choice on your computer.

When you install the packages onto your live site, it will place the items into their correct location in the site hierarchy. If you are replacing something, you can choose to ‘overrite’ otherwise you can merge.

Something to consider when doing this is that you have all of the controls required for the item packaged up with it. If you leave bits behind it could cause issues and you’ll spend more time re-adding things and having to investigate what was missed.