Hi,
I've just watched the tutorial on Portal Template creation and the latest on deployment and synchronisation.
I'm soon going to be transferring a few portals from my test environment to production.  Due to differences between the installations I doubt I'll be able to use Red gate.

If I use portal templates; What are the potential pitfalls?  I have a lot of modules on the sites.  Will only modules that use iPortable come with content?  Would it be safer to work without content?

You might want to take a look at Evotiva's Backup Script, too. If you have ftp and database access, you can use the "native" version of their tool.

Templates are a good tool, but they might not get everything moved. Not all modules export content when you create a template. The tutorial about using templates does identify some shortcomings and gives some ideas how to overcome them.

For my money, though, nothing is better than moving a database and web directory directly to the target site.

I'm with you there - what I'm lacking in my toolkit is the ability to backup/restore a single portal.  For my money the multi-portal ability is a really great feature of DNN, unfortunately, it's difficult to seperate out a single site's data.

I'll probably use the Red Gate solution in the long run, but clearly the production and dev environments need to be well aligned for it to be practical.  I always seem to have more than 1 portal development on the go at a time.

Thank for the Evotiva link - I'll check it out.