Does anyone have experience with the option MERGE for using Templates in existing portals?
Your tutorials cover the usage of the REPLACE option, but unfortunately not MERGE.

Our scenario: we have "portalowners", who don't belong to the Administrator role, but who have edit role for parts of their portals (on site and/or module level). For new pages and changes to settings we would like to use templates with the option MERGE to introduce those changes on all portals without loosing existing content.

Thanks for your help.

I would recommend if you are not sure that the merge facility will work to your requirements to install your live website on a localhost test area and see if the merge facility works as you require, you can find out how to do this using this tutorial: How to backup a live hosted DotNetNuke website and restore it to a localhost installation

If I recall correctly the merge facility will add pages and modules to the existing content without deleting the content - there is the potential for duplicate content so I would make sure you test this first before attempting it on a live website.

Let us know how you get on, I would be interested to hear about it, thanks

Thanks for the fast reply!

Well - I already did some tests on our test system and I was expecting the behaviour you described.
But - nothing happend!

With the MERGE option neither pages nor modules were added and also no settings of existing modules and pages were changed.
So I'm wondering about the way MERGE - option is supposed to work?

My exact way of testing this:
1.) create a source portal PORTAL1 with modules A, B and pages 1,2,3
2.) create a template from that source portal (without content)
3.) use the template to create PORTAL2
4.) add modules + pages to PORTAL1
5.) create a second template (no content)
6.) use the site wizard in PORTAL2 with the second template and option MERGE

Am I missing something?
I couldn't find any documentation on the mechanism for merging an existing portal (PORTAL2) with a new template!
Is the template going to override any setting in the existing portal? ...

Regards,

Hi Lee!

Do you have any new hints on the issues above?

I also have one more question: we have developed a photo module with some custom actions for setting the type of photos being displayed. Unfortunately these settings are not exported to the template.

Do you know of a way to automatically (or manually) add these settings, so they get imported in a new portal where the template is used?

Hello,

Have you experimented with using the merge and exporting content? - I've recently being using the merge option when I wanted to merge the content of 2 portals together and it worked fine. (this was v4.5.4)

You will need to programme your module to allow the exporting of templates. I would suggest you look at one of the core modules that allows exporting and view the source code to see how the core team have set it up.

Thanks,