Best Practice Questions

Hi John,

I have 2 questions concerning best practices related to deploying and administering Dot NetNuke.

1st ? Once I have finished developing the site and it is live, what is the best method for continuing to develop the site without risking some kind of portal crash, error, etc?  I upgraded the FAQ module and was frankly "scared to death" that something would go wrong.  Thankfully, it didn't, but it felt risky. I want to be able to copy down the live site to my development machine and do all additonal module installs and configurations there.  Once I'm satisfied with the results, I would want to copy it back up to my production server.  In order to get it copied down, must I detach the database, back it up (I use SQL 2005 Express Management Studio) then copy all files and restore to my developement server? I know I need to also adjust my web config during this process to make the right entries for machine key, etc.   This means the site goes down for a short period of time while I complete the process.  Is this what most folks do?  Do they place an app offline file in the root during this time?  Is there any method of accomplishing this without the site being taken offline?

2nd ? What is the best setup for accomplishing a corporate or organization intranet/internet/extranet scenario using DNN?  Do you have a loose definition of the 3 terms and how they relate to DNN?  Do I do each one as a separate installation or do I use child portals?  If child portals, are there a lot of issues I will encounter in trying to make all 3, intranet/internet/extranet, all work together seamlessly as it relates to security, the sharing of content, logins, user accounts, etc.?

Look forward to hearing your musings as I respect your insight a great deal.

Thanks,

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for the questions and the respect. It means a lot to me.

For #1 concerning the updating of a live site.  For general module installs and upgrades I just do a backup of the DB and the Website folder. Then I install it and ope for the best.  Very rarely do I ever have to restore the backup.  One reason for this though is that I don't install a module that I haven't vetted on my local test install first.  For major upgrades I do the complete backup and then transfer to my local machine first.  I leave the production site live during this time, and try to keep the actual upgrade time very short, then restore everything back in production.

If the upgrade goes bad locally, I just give up and start the complete process over when I'm ready to make another attempt using my new found experience (DNN seems to always give me some new experience somehow).

For #2.  The best answer I can think of is the old favorite: "It Depends".  I think that loosely defined in terms of DNN that they all are relatively the same.  Where it will be different will depend on how you want to treat each group of stakehoders/users in the different environments.  I have recommended in the past that people actually have two instances of DNN that connect to the same DB for some internal/external situations.  I have also managed a site that had a nightly process to sync an internal set of users and profiles to an external DB being used for DNN.

I have also recommended that everything be kept external and just use security roles to separate the content.  This way is easiest to visualize and easy to realize using DNN without compromise to most principles of segregation.  With the skinning aspects handled at the page level, you also get the ability to define each area with it's own visual seperation.

Feel free to prompt me for any details or to just tell me I am missing the boat on what your questions actually were.

Concerning #1
Is it correct to assume that the db has to be detached in order to perform a backup or is this just a limitation of the software I'm using (SQL 2005 Studio Management Express)? In other words, do all DNN sites "go down" while backups of db's take place along with the copying of the root directory folder?  It has been my experience that when trying to copy down the root folder that I definitely had to either detach the db or restart my machine or app in order for it not to give me an error while copying.

Thanks,

Paul