Installation and Deployment - Upgrading is simple
Contensis is always upgradeable
One of the key philosophies we have in our team is that the system should "always be upgradeable" - we never make changes that would prevent this and we introduce breaking changes where sensible, as options so that when you upgrade they will not affect you.
This screenshot shows the downloads area available to any customer to download the latest version of Contensis.
The system is architected in such a way that it is never necessary to bespoke any part of the core system. Instead developers using Contensis can build on the layers we provide to extend or enhance to meet specific needs, although it has to be said that this is very rarely needed.
This philosophy ensures that at any time you can click through to your client download area and get the latest version. You can also see a full change log at any time of exactly what our development team are working on. This change log is updated daily.
Typically, any upgrade can be carried out in less than five minutes with four mouse clicks - perhaps we should take the next buttons out!
This screenshot shows the Contensis Installer
The install proccess is carried out by firstly downloading the relevant version off the support portal, and then simply executing the installer set-up package.
The installer is a standard MSI file, and gives you the option to choose various options as part of the install.
Mainly the biggest decision is whether you tick the button to upgrade your site, this will kick-off the automated deployment process.
Unattended Install
If you run a development server and a production server, it is often useful to have a system in place for upgrading the development server without the need for any server admin support. The Contensis installer can be executed directly from the command line. We find this very useful internally where we are running perhaps 5-10 customers on a single development server and we want to upgrade the systems with the simple click of a batch file. In your case, it is likely to be used more for upgrading development servers after you have done a sync between Production and Dev.
With many solutions, when you upgrade you may need to do all sorts of strange manual tasks to update the CMS itself. Contensis supports a completely automated deployment process. This means that after you have run an upgrade, all you need do is a single click to deploy the changes to your test or live servers.
This screenshot shows the automated deployment system upgrading the live server for this project
Our front-end decoupled architecture ensures that even when you upgrade the CMS you are not rushed into making the changes on the live server at the same time, which is often the limitation with many systems that have a dynamic publishing model. For simple upgrades the decoupled environment means that we don't need to necessarily test an upgrade first on a development server.
You can simply run the CMS upgrade and, at installer time, tick the option to upgrade your test (preview) website and staging server if you have one. Once this is done you can fully test the test and staging server, whilst content production continues; the only caveat is that until you deploy to live, publishing will be delayed.
Once you are happy with the test server you can then simply tick the box to upgrade your live. That's it - there is nothing else too it!
In practise, because the automated deployment is so easy, customers often immediately deploy to live when they have just had a simple Hot Fix or similar.
So, all-in-all no more config files to mess with or files to copy from A to B hoping you remember every step, Contensis takes care of everything for you with the click of a button to initiate it.
While there are many benefits to automated deployment, probably the biggest is that there is no longer the need to worry about silly human errors taking out your live site!