Hello,

We're working on setting up a staging server for our site. One of the issues arising is how we will go about moving files to production when they are ready.

One complication is that we use Dreamweaver and Contribute, both of which create files containing version information, and these should not be moved from a staging environment to production, or vice versa.

My colleague off-site uses a mac, and has found that Transmit is a great tool that allows exclusion of file types during transfer.

I work on-site, and our IT department has strict regulations about FTP. We can't use FTP--file transfer clients have to use SSH or SFTP. My SSH client does not allow filtering/excluding files.

My main question is if people can suggest a smart, cheap or free, transfer tool for Windows that uses SSH and can filter file types. Even better if it does comparisons for changed files across environments.

A side question would be whether anyone has any experience administering a site with two environments (staging and prod) where there is a content management tool such as Contribute (the content is not stored in a database, rather it generates content code within the framework of a template). Scenario A: If I point Contribute to the production server, the users are publishing straight to there, and my developer colleague and I may have some versioning challenges if we're making changes using a development/staging environment. Scenario B: If I point Contribute to staging, I then have the logistical problem of how to transfer all the files the users change (along with new images, pdfs, etc) to production from staging in an efficient manner. Users may not easily know all the dependent files, etc., so it would be better not to have to rely on them reporting them to me.

Does anyone have any suggestions of tools to handle Scenario B, or thoughts on Scenario A?

Finally, a philosophical question--would you let your content people publish straight to production? Contribute makes it fairly, though not completely, foolproof. Users can only add text and images, but there's a chance that something they could do, like add too large an image, would blow out the layout.

Thanks!!

Originally Posted by greencampuscm

My main question is if people can suggest a smart, cheap or free, transfer tool for Windows that uses SSH and can filter file types. Even better if it does comparisons for changed files across environments.

Almost. I've never tried it but doubt WebMaestro does SFTP, but otherwise it does exactly what you want ... mainly versioning to only move the files that need moving.

Originally Posted by greencampuscm

Finally, a philosophical question--would you let your content people publish straight to production? Contribute makes it fairly, though not completely, foolproof. Users can only add text and images, but there's a chance that something they could do, like add too large an image, would blow out the layout.

That really depends on a lot of things I don't know about your site. If your main worry is someone uploading too large an image, you can write some pretty simple code on the server to check the bounds of an image and resize it if necessary. I moderate the comments on my blog, because in the last day I've gotten two spams pointing to porn sites I don't want Google to even think about associating me with. Wikipedia doesn't, but should have some kind of editing practice: last time I checked their site, Lake Tahoe was in central Utah. I've been to both places and seen with my own eyes what they say isn't true.

So whether or not you let people - your users - write straight to production really depends on the nature of your site, and the risks inherent in publishing new stuff.