Content Type in source control - best practice

[Arjen]

Hi all,

I've got a number of content types that I defined manually in the web portal during development/testing.

Now I've trying to find a way of getting the content type definitions into source control as well as deploying the content types to a staging server.

I looked at the Content Type REST API and I guess I can write a plugin that calls this REST API when it's deployed and by doing so makes sure my custom content types get created etc, but this approach feel a bit rough to me.

So, is there an 'official'/best practice way of deploying and managing content types and relationships?

Thanks

Arjen

[Xander Steinmann]

There is currently no easy way to add Content Types (and many other things) to source control. You'd need to create your own way to export/import them to source control. We try to add all code in templates, containers, widgets and custom code fields to VTL files which can be exported to source control.

For deploying to another server you can use push publishing.

Kind regards,

Xander

[Arjen]

Ah ok, thanks Xander.

I'll have to read up on that though but will give it a try.

Arjen

[Pete DeGraw]

We have been wrestling with this since day one with our three environments. Our environments get out of sync regularly with our team of 6 developers. It's a major frustration with dotCMS' strange approach to Content Types. A JSON or YAML file would be much better in defining content types.

[Will Ezell]

Well, good news is that content types can be defined and managed in JSON in dotCMS 4.1:

https://dotcms.com/docs/latest/create-content-types-of-each-base-type

On Thu, Aug 17, 2017 at 5:58 PM, Pete DeGraw <peted...@gmail.com> wrote:

We have been wrestling with this since day one with our three environments. Our environments get out of sync regularly with our team of 6 developers. It's a major frustration with dotCMS' strange approach to Content Types. A JSON or YAML file would be much better in defining content types.

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[Matthew Torrenzano]

Pete, did you ever solve this issue of putting content types in version control?

[Will Ezell]

Content types can can imported and exported via api as json.  See: 

https://doc.dotcms.com/docs/latest/json-view-content-types

https://doc.dotcms.com/docs/latest/content-type-api

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[Pete DeGraw]

Nope. And the docs (https://doc.dotcms.com/docs/latest/json-view-content-types) are out of date. There is no import / export of content types. Maybe just REST API interaction. Developers prefer binary files to version control not interfaces. Seems dotCMS doesn't want to solve this for developers.

[Falzone, Chris]

Pete,

There is stuff coming in the roadmap to address this.  At the bootcamp conference this year there was a demo around one implementation of this.  So, while, yes, dotCMS doesn't do it out of the box currently.  They are working on it, and you are free to implement your own way of handling this using the ContentType API.   The challenge in something like this is you could find 100 different ways to implement it based on each individual project/team's needs. While you and me might like a json representation, another team might want XML or yaml.  While I work out of github, some teams use internal gitlab repositories.  While I might choose to orchestrate this through AWS services, another team might want to use Google Cloud, and yet others would want a 100% dotCMS native solution.

So, at least if what was said at the conference about the roadmap for dotCMS can be trusted, dotCMS has heard and is working on it.  But if you really need it today .. the REST API is specifically designed for this purpose.  

Hope that helps!

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