Comments on: Code moves forward. Content moves backward.

By: Code Movement vs Content Movement | Digital Asset Management

Code Movement vs Content Movement | Digital Asset Management — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 11:00:53 +0000

[...] Gottlieb has written a great post entitled “Code moves forward. Content moves backward.” that, by strange coincidence, echoes an Alfresco KB item authored by Alfresco’s very own Ben [...]

By: Martin Aspeli

Martin Aspeli — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:50:29 +0000

Great post. Ironically, it’s almost exactly the same words I used in my book (Professional Plone Development) talking about this concept in the context of managing a real-world Plone project.

By: seth

seth — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:08:34 +0000

@cleve years back I worked on an ATG project where we had two production environments: one was live, the other standby. We copied live to standby, did our work on standby then pointed the routers so that the standby became our primary. Next upgrade we did the same thing the other way around. This worked pretty well but you definitely had a fixed window to do your work because the system was essentially locked down from the copy to when you repointed.

By: seth

seth — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 12:22:47 +0000

Good point Travis. It really depends on the system. Most CMS provide pretty good tools for safely reviewing content on the production instance of the application. However, the ability to safely test templating code (and content type definitions, workflow definitions, etc.) on production varies widely from platform to platform. I agree that bad content can be dangerous. One of my prior clients is an online sports book and publishing the wrong odds can cost millions of dollars in seconds. An editor can also do something silly like put an unclosed object tag in a persistent content element (like a header) and make every page on the site go white. Inadvertent assignment of permissions on a piece of content can yield embarrassing results too. That said, I think there is a higher margin for error in code. Or, maybe its just my code

By: Travis Wissink

Travis Wissink — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:37:43 +0000

Nice post Seth. I’m definitely going to bookmark this one as I come across customers asking about this same scenario.

One comment though. “Because one piece of code can potentially affect every page on the site.” Can’t you say the same about content? A reused piece of content can screw up a site just as bad if not worse than a piece of code. Say it is a marketing piece of content giving certain type of customer 80% off of on a widget and the publisher flagged the content for consumption by all users. Oops. I think that content should move forward like code, however, it is technically a different type of solution, i.e. bpm and ECI not ant deployments.

By: cleve

cleve — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:54:03 +0000

Nice post Seth. For management purposes, treating code and configuration as content, keeps things real simple. Backup the production instance, without taking it down, and you have everything in one place to be restored at your leisure for troubleshooting, snapshots, scaling, etc…

I tend to roll code forward and live content backward to meet in the staging environment. Customer signs off and then roll forward into live. For test and qa environment, same deal but the content from live may be slightly more out of date. But that’s okay.

By: testking

testking — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 04:43:32 +0000

Really interesting one, i much appreciate. Thanks for sharing the information.

By: Peter Monks

Peter Monks — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:34:47 +0000

Pingback: http://blogs.alfresco.com/wp/pmonks/2009/07/01/code-movement-vs-content-movement/

By: Peter Monks » Code Movement vs Content Movement

Peter Monks » Code Movement vs Content Movement — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 22:32:36 +0000

[...] Gottlieb has written a great post entitled “Code moves forward. Content moves backward.” that, by strange coincidence, echoes an Alfresco KB item authored by Alfresco’s very [...]

By: Peter Monks

Peter Monks — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 21:57:05 +0000

This model works well when code and content are managed independently, but breaks down if the CMS is used to manage both. I don’t advocate a blended model (the “C” in CMS stands for “Content” after all, not “Code”), but it’s a strong meme, particularly in the ecosystems of certain specific CMS vendors.