It has come to our attention that the documented recommendations regarding the deployment order of MSM Package Types does not match our current best practice. Product documentation will be updated with the following new recommendation.
Note: The recommended order is for typical deployment cases. It does not cover all deployment scenarios. Each implementation may have some unique characteristics that may call for a different order than the one recommended below.
[ol]
[li]Workflows[/li][li]Community Definitions[/li]Note: Technically, Communities could be deployed at any point in the order because they are only referenced by name in the ACLs of other objects. Deploying Communities early makes testing of later package installations more effective. Remember that Role Membership must be updated manually on the target server if Roles are added or if Membership is different in the source and target environments.
[li]Slots[/li][li]Templates, Content Types [/li]These implementation elements should deployed in one Archive, and in the order specified (all Templates followed by all Content Types). Include any Keywords used by Content Types as dependencies. Also see this posting on adding and removing Content Type fields.
[li]Content Assemblers (if any)[/li][li]Slots (again)[/li]Slots must be deployed twice due to the circular references between Slots and Templates. The first deployment adds the Slots to the server; the second deployment updates the Template references within the Slots.
Contexts, Item Filters, Content Lists (include Location Schemes)
[li]Sites (include Editions and Publishers)[/li][li]Display Formats[/li][li]Content Views & Searches [/li][li]Action Menus[/li][li]Relationship Definitions[/li][li]Locales[/li][li]Keywords [/li]One or more archives containing Keywords not used in Content Types.
[li]Components[/li][li]Folder Trees [/li]Automatically includes all folders, but does not include navigation content.
[li]Folders [/li]Deploy to include navigation content where applicable.
[/ol]
We strongly recommend that you test any combination of packages in a test environment before deploying it to your production environment.
Unsuccessfully trying to follow this order on our 6.5.2. solution.
Shouldn’t site definition be deployed ahead of context and content lists?
Sinisa,
Contexts are a dependency for Sites, so Contexts must be deployed before Sites. Similarly, Content Lists are a dependency for Editions.
We do note that the recommended order is for the typical case, but for a specific implementation, a different order may be required. Yours may be a case that requires a different order. Unfortunately, the only real way to determine the correct order is to test your packages in an environment dedicated to that purpose.
RLJII