Things I've learned with new version/branches vs what I thought

[dreamingdigital]

One thing I learned is that all readytheme components like images, banners, content sections and navigation sets must exist on all branches even if you're not using them on a certain branch. The content of each of these is branch/version dependant which is nice, but the STRUCTURE aka the readytheme items themselves MUST EXIST. That was not obvious to me until I deleted a main navigation bar that was part of a development branch and it also deleted that navigation bar from the production branch. Luckly this was on my dev store to do things like this on... but that's totally worth a "WHOA" moment. Also, if you assign items to a page in one branch that also assigns items to the page ALL branches. This was also strange in my mind but that's how it works. You don't have to have MVT code on the page using that item but the item will be assigned to all branches. So don't delete readyTheme components unless they're not needed in ALL branches. AND watch it when adding/removing items because that also affects all branches.

...maybe that's a no brainier for some but mind-blown for me.

[Zinbar]

Colin, about 5 hours ago I did exactly what you describe. I deleted the NAV and CONTENT sections on the DEV branch and totally wiped out a live store. Support had to roll it back from last nights back up. Thank you for posting this, MIVA needs some better documentation on this as they told me I probably was just on the wrong branch when I deleted.

[lesliekirk]

One thing I learned is that all readytheme components like images, banners, content sections and navigation sets must exist on all branches even if you're not using them on a certain branch. The content of each of these is branch/version dependant which is nice, but the STRUCTURE aka the readytheme items themselves MUST EXIST. That was not obvious to me until I deleted a main navigation bar that was part of a development branch and it also deleted that navigation bar from the production branch. Luckly this was on my dev store to do things like this on... but that's totally worth a "WHOA" moment. Also, if you assign items to a page in one branch that also assigns items to the page ALL branches. This was also strange in my mind but that's how it works. You don't have to have MVT code on the page using that item but the item will be assigned to all branches. So don't delete readyTheme components unless they're not needed in ALL branches. AND watch it when adding/removing items because that also affects all branches.

...maybe that's a no brainier for some but mind-blown for me.

Whoa, indeed! Thant's not what I would have thought to be the expected behavior. So the dev branch is not a true dev environment?

[dreamingdigital]

lesliekirk RE: So the dev branch is not a true dev environment?

I guess a better word for what Miva has given us is "code versioning".

All files and ReadyTheme things, and items assigned to a page are not code, they're assets. All assets (aka structure?) need to exist in all branches so that the code versioning can work. That's the simplest I can think of explaining what I've found out the hard way.

[Brennan]

Hi Colin -

ReadyTheme components do exist across all branches and there is an active flag to determine if they show or not for each branch. Each one does have its own versions though. So the same navigation set on production can have completely different navigation items on a dev branch.

The delete action here is really where a potential problem arises. Our intention is to never have an action on a dev branch impact live so I'll talk with dev to see how we can address this. At a minimum we should at least be providing a warning before you delete.

[Kent Multer]

I think there's also a performance issue here, if components are being assigned to pages that don't need them. When a page is rendered, the store will call the Initialize functions for all the components, even the unused ones.