Easy way to publish to Test and Live/Prod environments.

[iannicholson]

I have a couple of clients who are sticklers for testing. For Xara, it's a painful process.

What I'd like to see in Xara is a means to be able to publish a site to different environments, so I could publish a site to test environment where someone could have a play and test, then, once all is good, publish the same site to the live or production environment (the web!).

I know it's painful, especially for a code-generator tool like Xara Web Designer, but it would make my life a LOT easier.

Any ideas?

[gwpriester]

I'm not sure if this option is available for WD9 but WD11 and Designer Pro X11 offer free accounts with Xara Hosting. This is a good way to publish a test site for clients to see with publishing to the actual domain. For example, I have changed the URL that Xara created to gwpriester.xara.hosting and here is a test site I put up http://gwpriester.xara.hosting/wide/

[Egg Bramhill]

First question Ian is how exactly are these clients 'testing' your sites?

Do they have copies of Xara and amending your xar/web files? If so publish your web or xar files to Dropbox or Google Drive then you both have access to the latest versions, amended by either yourself or the client.

Or else use Xara Online Designer where the client can amend the text and change an image in a limited way without messing your background template in any way. This is a fairly new development not up to speed yet (Beta) but I think it suits what most clients want when saying they want to edit the content.

[iannicholson]

Hi Guys,

Thanks for your replies.

In each case, what they want me to do is publish to their test domain = http://test.company.com (or somewhere else), and when they're happy, have me publish it to http://www.company.com.

They don't want to make changes.

It's a bit of a pain because the test domains can have a different password to the live domain, so it means changing the settings each time - even for the smallest change.

These sites require a constant 'publish to test first' protocol. At one site, they wanted me to publish to Test first, and then manually FTP the files to the live environment!

What would be a BOON would be for Xara to store more than one set of publishing details per site. As you say Gary, I could publish it on Xara Hosting as a trial before publishing to the actual domain (and have done that in the past too).

[siran]

In V10 and V11 Designer Pro you can save publish profiles and then select one during publishing.

[pauland]

At one site, they wanted me to publish to Test first, and then manually FTP the files to the live environment!

I would say that your client's request that you manually FTP files is entirely reasonable and is the way that most people work outside of the Xara userbase. It is normal to use an external FTP client to publish websites and in the web design world is the usual way of working.

Siran seems to have the answer, though.