DTAP infrastructure
Regardless of how you host your content management system, you want your IT team to apply the appropriate development process. We recommend separate environments for Development, Testing, Acceptance and Production (DTAP).
This arrangement provides robust upgrade capabilities: you can test patches and bug fixes within an acceptance environment, ensuring that they do not disrupt day-to-day operations for websites running in the production environment. Files and databases are always backed up, ensuring that a rollback is always possible.
Tridion Sites includes the Import and Export service, which facilitates DTAP-related activities. Use this service to transfer content between Content Manager instances. You can code against the service yourself, or you can use Content Porter, the desktop application, to transfer content, layout and logic for batch-based integrations across multiple DTAP environments. This ensures a structured quality control process.
The granular and customizable content transfer mechanism can be fully automated. Content Porter can be used to export or import all artefacts of the website, or only the parts of a website that have changed. Content Porter maintains the relationship between any related items, and ensures that content reuse is not disrupted.