Which content and settings are synced
Overview
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
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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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SiteSync promotes can sync both the structure and the data of custom fields of built-in modules.
You must make sure the option is turned on and configured.
For more information, see Configure structure and data sync.
NOTE: You cannot sync custom fields of built-in modules using the single item sync.
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Content items » module structure
Items with media fields » corresponding media item
Hierarchical item » parent
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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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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 synced and 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.
Revision history
The SiteSync module syncs the revision history of content items and pages.
All versions are synced, together with the user that modified the item and created the respective version.
NOTE: If the user who modified a version in the release history does not exist on the target environment, when the item is synced, this user will appear in the revision history as USER NOT FOUND.
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:
Which content and data cannot be synced