7.6 Development and Production Servers

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For most sites, other than the smallest, it would probably make sense to separate the development and production servers to two or more separate machines. While increasing hardware and software costs, this does allow far better quality control and management of the site.

Normally the site would be created on the first development server and then the Site Deployment Manager would be used to move the site structure to a second development server. The second server is used just for content development work, such as authoring and editing, with subsequent changes to the site structure being completed on the first development server and then copied to the second-again, using the Site Deployment Manager. These structural changes will be synchronized, leaving the content intact. The content is then moved to the production server using the Site Deployment Manager.

For content that carries regularly changing data that needs to update the Web site frequently (e.g., stock information or press releases), create a channel to hold the postings and then just move that across to save time.

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