Updating your site...

Hi Everyone

When I am publishing my site I get the usual offline error message that stops people using it until it's all finished copying on to the server. If you have a site that you may have hundreds of people using all day, but you need to update it quite a lot during the day, what do you do..?

Is there a way to update (publish) and still let users continue using the site..?

If not, can I have my own message displayed when users attempt to go on the site instead of the default one..?

Cheers

Luke

 

Hi,
There are some tricks, depending on how you work the site.
For example, publish all of your new assets first, like images and any secondary files.
Then publish any assemblies that need updating in your /bin/ folder.
Finally publish your page changes, and even those can be done in groups.
If for example you run a forum update it, then go back and update the pages else where.

All of this is easily done with the Copy Web Site feature in recent versions of Visual Studio and Visual Web Developer. You can see attributes of files that need to be published, newer files on the server, etc. Expression Web v3 is awesome at this too.
All the best,
Mark

 

Thanks mate...

I'm giving this a trial today...

If I did want to put a custom app_offline page in, how would I go about that..? Doesn't it get generated automatically..?

Cheers

Luke

 

Hi,
It does generate automatically locally but not on the remote end.
You need to keep a copy and deploy it then remove or leave it there and keep renaming it.
On your local end a copy should go to the Recycle Bin each time you exit the project.
All the best,
Mark