Content staging

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Staging allows you to easily transfer changes made to documents or objects in a Kentico instance on one server to a different instance on another server. You can also perform complete synchronization of all documents and objects. Staging is particularly useful if you need to synchronize multiple environments during development, for example:

Development -> Testing -> Editing (staging) -> Live (production)

All documents stored in the content tree of websites can be synchronized. However, not all objects in Kentico support synchronization. See the What can be synchronized section for more information.

Setting up staging

Configuring content staging - to allow synchronization, you need to configure the Kentico instances that you wish to connect.

Bi-directional content staging - explains how to configure servers to be both target and source servers at the same time. Allows transferring of changes in both directions.

Using X.509 authentication - learn how to install your own X.509 certificates or how to use our sample certificates for the X.509 type of staging service authentication.

Staging large files - Kentico supports staging of physical files stored as Document attachments and in Media libraries. Learn how to set the maximum size of synchronized files.

Content staging security - learn about the permissions that roles need to perform synchronization actions.

Synchronization

Synchronizing the content - explains how to transfer synchronization tasks to other servers.

Automatic content synchronization - set up the system to perform synchronization automatically.

Other

Exporting and importing sites - you can also manually transfer your content to other instances of Kentico using the export and import features.

What can be synchronized

Content staging supports synchronization of the following data:

  • Document data - documents in the website content tree.
    • Pages need to be on the same place in the content tree on both the source and target servers.
    • Timeout defined for documents that are part of a workflow is not synchronized for consistency reasons.
  • Document file attachments - if a document contains attachments or file fields, the files are synchronized together with the document.
  • Document relationships - relationships between documents are synchronized if the relationship type and both documents exist on the target server. Synchronization is NOT supported for relationships between documents on different sites.
  • Workflow process - only published document versions are synchronized to the target server and both servers need to have the same workflow schemas defined.
  • Custom tablesand their data.
  • Media librariesand the files and folders in them.
  • ACLs (document-level permissions)
  • Global objects - all global objects except for the exceptions listed below.

Content staging does not support synchronization of the following data:

Staging and ID values

Content staging cannot ensure that objects and documents have the same ID values after being transferred to a different environment. However, the synchronization process preserves GUID values. Use GUID fields if you need to identify documents or objects across multiple staging environments.