Which content and settings are synced
SiteSync helps you keep the content between your environments up to date and in sync, without risking any content loss, broken parent-child hierarchy, or other potential issues on your Live environment. When promoting content, you can decide whether to sync the entire site or do a selective sync of individual pages, content items, and templates and what content to exclude from syncing.
Content in Sitefinity CMS comes in many forms, such as text, media, or content fields. Content can be contained in pages and displayed by widgets. In addition, depending on its hierarchical structure, content can be organized and classified via taxonomies and tags. And last, but not least, website content has settings that define its usage and structure, such as permissions and search indexes.
You can select to promote all content items of the News content type or make a more granular selection of which specific News items with what classification to promote. If you have dynamic content, you may also want to promote the site settings, for example, the dynamic module’s custom fields and structure or assignment of users and roles.
The following sections describe in detail what content you can sync. For a list of what data and content you cannot sync, see Limitations to promoting data via SiteSync.
Content
The following table lists what content you can promote from source to target environments.
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Promoted content
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Description
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Dependencies (selective sync and others)
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Built-in content types
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Media content and libraries
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- Documents and Document libraries
- Images and Image libraries
- Videos and Video libraries
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When promoting Sitefinity CMS media content items, for example images, that are stored on an external blob storage provider, SiteSync updates only the content item properties (such as UrlName, Title). For more information, see Considerations when using SiteSync.
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Dynamic content
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You can choose to synchronize the structure of the module, or both the structure and its data. The structure of the module includes creating any new fields and dynamic module types, editing them or changing the hierarchy.
NOTE: To promote the content of a new dynamic module, you need to sync not only its content, but also its structure.
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Dynamic items » module structure
Dynamic items with media fields » corresponding media item
Hierarchical dynamic item » parents
For the new Dynamic module content to be promoted to the destination environment, you need to sync not only its content, but also the Dynamic module structure.
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Related data
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Related content or media
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Some types of content may be dependent on each other. If you decide to promote only certain types of content (or selected items from that content type), you must ensure you respect the content relations. For example, if you add a related data field of type Images to a content type, you must promote not only the items of this content type, but Images as well.
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Custom fields
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Site Sync promotes only the custom fields of dynamic modules and only when you select this option explicitly. For more information see SiteSync advanced settings.
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Pages
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Pages are synchronized together with their personalized versions, if any.
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Pages » page templates
Pages » widget templates
Pages » segments for personalized versions
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Ecommerce
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- Attributes and Attribute Values
Any language versions of attributes and values are also synced.
- Products
Product data along with each product’s corresponding images, downloadable files and content files, and any language versions of titles and descriptions are synced.
You can synchronize products from both predefined and custom product types. You cannot synchronize the product types themselves. For more information, see Which content and settings are synced.
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Hierarchical content
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SiteSync promotes hierarchical content types and persists the dependencies. For example, if you sync blog posts, the parent Blog will also be synced.
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Parent is always synced, even if you do not explicitly select it.
IMPORTANT: You cannot explicitly select to sync only the children of a hierarchical taxonomy, without the parent taxonomy itself.
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Personalized content
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Promote user segments, so that synchronization of personalized pages is enabled.
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Multilingual content
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If you are using more than one language, you can select to sync items in a particular language only.
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Content organization
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Classifications (including Tags, Categories, Departments, and so on)
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Classifications for content modules are automatically synced, even if not explicitly selected.
If you add a custom field of type classification to a content type, you must take care of synchronizing the configurations and data structure first, and then promote the content and its classifications. For more information see Which content and settings are syncedand Best practices: Difference between SiteSync and Export / Import.
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For all selected items types, you can use selective sync. For more information, see Promote content with SiteSync.
NOTE: The last modified date attribute is calculated automatically by the Sitefinity CMS ORM when the record is inserted into the database. That is why on the source and on the target servers there may be different values for the last modified date.
Templates and widgets
By default, the SiteSync promotes data that is stored in the DB. This includes page and widget templates, as well. Keep in mind that you need to manually copy (for example, via deployment) any resources used on your website located on the File system, such as MVC templates or mapped WebForms templates, to the destination environment File system.
Permissions
By default, SiteSync promotes content along with its permissions. If you need to have different permissions on the source and destination environment, see SiteSync advanced settings.
Site properties
In case you created a new site on the source environment, you can use SiteSync to promote the site, its properties to the destination environment. This includes:
Sitefinity CMS settings
You can promote the following Sitefinity CMS settings to the destination environment:
What content and data cannot be synced
- Custom fields for built-in modules
By design, built-in modules custom fields created on the source destination are not synced to the destination environment. SiteSync promotes only the custom fields of dynamic modules and only when you select this option explicitly. For more information see Setup SiteSync.
NOTE: When you add custom fields to content modules, this results in both configurations and DB changes. Thus, after such changes, you need to use the import/export functionality or manually sync the DB and configurations to use SiteSync properly. For more information, see Best practices: Difference between SiteSync and Export / Import.
- Forums, comments, and ratings are not promoted
Forum posts content, as well as ratings and comments, are generated by website visitors directly on the live site and thus are not available for sync.
- File system content
Content that is not in the database, such as themes, MVC templates and master pages.
For more information, see Overview: Page templates.
NOTE: You can, however, synchronize library content that is stored in the File system storage.
- Backend pages
- Feeds
- Workflow definitions
- Responsive design settings
- Email campaigns