This is new: Populate a site from different installations

Author Message

Jorge estévez

Sunday 17 August 2008 10:47:39 am

Hi to all...

I have developed a site [no big deal :-) ], what I would like to do is to install the site in different PC's, different persons will "feed" the site at different branch of nodes (not being concurrent at all between them), now take into consideration that the site is offline, each person will have a copy of the site only at their PC.

How do I gather all the information (I know exporting and importing within EZ will handle the information in the database) but the problem arises when the var directory gets populated with images, I do not know how to handle all the directories that will be made once all persons insert their information and then "united them" as a whole in the final site...

Resume: Is there a workaround to update a site from different installations and then unite the database and var directory and get a site that works....

thanks...

Diseño Web Cuba
Web Design Cuba
www.elfosdesign.com

Pascal Specht

Monday 18 August 2008 12:14:23 am

Hi Jorge,

that looks very challenging to me, as you will have to deal with "unique" IDs which may not stay unique when merging... I mean new objects created on the different databases may get the same content id, no ?

</Pascal>

Jorge estévez

Monday 25 August 2008 6:03:33 am

Hello,

Can Ez team give us an hint if this is possible?
thanks

Diseño Web Cuba
Web Design Cuba
www.elfosdesign.com

zurgutt -

Monday 25 August 2008 7:26:02 am

Theoretically you could do content export from each of those installations, make a new installation of same version and import the content packages and it should work in new site. No need to mess with files in var etc, packages contain them.

Practically this is harder though. Package import has quite often screwed up site for me, so be sure to make intermediate backups. If the package contains many objects, which it probably does, you will have problems in admin with php file upload max size and php max run time. Again, theoretically there is command line package management script to help in this case but its usage is largely undocumented and i have not been able to figure out how to do install with it.

What i have done is upload exported packages to server by ftp, imported them to ezp with "php ezpm.php import package", then modified php.ini to give it gigs of memory and half a hour (or however much needed) runtime. Then clicked the install package button in admin and if you pray hard, it will complete successfully.

Certified eZ developer looking for projects.
zurgutt at gg.ee

Russell Michell

Tuesday 26 August 2008 4:07:42 pm

Hi Jorge,

When I read your question I immediately thought "Versioning System". Something like SVN (http://subversion.tigris.org/). However, the seeming lack of a network might be a bit of an issue and make things a bit clumsy:

Given that data from each PC needs to be exported and saved to some 3rd party storage medium anyway (CD-R, USB or External HDD etc) in order to later "merge" it to (presumably) the "master" install, could you not install SVN and an SVN repository on each client PC, then check-in changes from that eZ Install, on that PC, into that PCs local repository as an SVN branch?

Then you could save the SVN working copy (and obviously all the files in the .svn dir) to your storage medium and then once connected to the master PC, run an SVN merge from each client PC's stored repository files and data, with the master install's SVN data.

I have to concede however that setting up SVN to do this might require some effort (ensuring repository names, URLs and directory hierarchies were identical across each client PC - hard - but not impossible) and also that merging so many branches might become very difficult and the potential for merge conflicts will increase.

I might add I'm no SVN expert, I have never tried anything like this - I just thought of it just now :-) but maybe something to consider? Maybe ask around at the SubVersion website mailing list or IRC (Look under "Help" at http://subversion.tigris.org/)

You can't be the first person to have posed this scenario, surely? :-)

Good luck,
Russ

Russell Michell, Wellington, New Zealand.
We're building! http://www.theruss.com/blog/
I'm on Twitter: http://twitter.com/therussdotcom

Believe nothing, consider everything.

Jorge estévez

Thursday 28 August 2008 3:16:52 am

Hello!,

Thanks for your tips, I will try to mess up with packages and see if it works, my tree product structure has at the end of each nodes few products (no more than 40) so this solution could work (I will cross my fingers).

The SVN should wait, as it could be more complicated to make it work properly.

thanks to all

Diseño Web Cuba
Web Design Cuba
www.elfosdesign.com

Powered by eZ Publish™ CMS Open Source Web Content Management. Copyright © 1999-2014 eZ Systems AS (except where otherwise noted). All rights reserved.