Deploying Content and Configuration Updates

Deploying a new release of your project to a production environment may require updating existing repository content. For example: a new field "Vendor" with a default value "Hippo" was added to an existing content type "Product", and the default value must be added to existing "Product" documents.

This guide describes the concepts involved and the procedures for the most common use cases, to make your deployments quick and painless.

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Release Management
• Content Update Use Cases
  • Update Document Templates
  • Update CMS Configuration
  • Update HST Configuration
  • Update Existing Content Items

Precautions

Directly updating repository content in a production environment is discouraged, because during the process any publication channels (e.g. a website) may not be in a working state.

Instead we recommend you make a copy of your production database, set up a Hippo CMS instance that uses the copy of the production database as storage and perform the update in this CMS instance. When the update is finished successfully you can switch your production CMS to use the updated database copy. This way your publication channels can keep running against a 'static' database. During the update process, no content or configuration should be modified or created in the production environment until it is switched to the updated database.

Also, updates must be tested consistently in Development, Test and Acceptance environments before deployment in Production.