Question regarding publishing Frontpage web

[WCES Ryan]

So this one might be for those with some proficiency in Frontpage, but here goes:

My scenario is this. I am the webmaster for my organization, and I've been working for several months on redeveloping our site. The scheduled launch date is quickly approaching and I am trying to put together a launch plan. Currently, I have the new site set up in it's own web, and the rollover process will involve moving it over to the existing web that our employees use. Our environment is set up with a staging web that all updates are made on, which is then published to our production web.

It seems that the easiest thing to do would be to delete the current production and staging web, rename my redevelopment web to the same name as the staging, and then publish that into a blank production web. However, the site is quite large (over 4500 files and approx 350mb in size), and the test over my link here took just over an hour to publish. I will likely do the actual rollover from a different site which should cut that time down, but I'm sure there must be an easier way to do it, my idea of which is below.

What I've attempted is to create 2 copies of the redev web, one for staging and one for production. I can remote into the server and create the copies, which will only take a couple of minutes per copy. However, I run into problems when I attempt to publish the staging to production. The problem I am hung up on right now is that it is giving me an error on a thumbs.db.tmp file every time I try. I've managed to find some limited success in this, however I'm not confident enough to use this process for the actual launch.

Is there a better way of setting it up, so that I can create the 2 copies and seamlessly publish one into the other? Or would my first plan be ideal, which works better but is more time consuming? Downtime is somewhat an issue as this is a high traffic production site, I can afford a bit, but I would like to keep it as minimal as possible, anything under an hours would be good.

Any other tips on accomplishing this launch, or ideas on a launch plan?

 

[PTNL]

Those .tmp files should really not cause a problem. If Frontpage complains about them when doing a file push, then either 1) remove them from the push queue, or 2) try another FTP application.
(I'd vote for the latter.)

As for the question on staging and promotion, the general flow I use for multi-environment web app's is: push from dev to staging, and from staging to prod. That alone should cut down on the deployment timeframe by avoiding the dev to production upload times.

I wouldn't have two dev codebases used for separate destination environments. You eventually have to do code diff'ing between different environments to resolve statements like "But it works fine on the ____ environment!".

Note that you'll still have a minimal amount of downtime (ie: copying content from staging to production), so having a temporary notice page put in place as the domain's default document/page during a scheduled deployment is an option.

Then again, if there is something particular in the code that is environment specific, then you should consider abstracting that and ignore updating that content in subsequent pushes (unless needed). If your question is more specific to a particular vendor's environment/code management application, then please provide that info as well.

Please note the title. It saids Webmastering and Programming. If you use Frontpage, you should not post here

Re-evaluate your pompous attitude. You may just realize that everyone starts somewhere, and that this post about code deployments and development IDE's is in the correct forum.