Continuous Delivery with Content Management

Systems (CMS) and User-Generated

Content (UGC)

Matthew Skelton23rd October 2013

#londoncd meetup group

@matthewpskelton

CMS and UGC

• Content Management System–WordPress, Drupal, CQ5, Magnolia,

Sitecore, SharePoint (?!)

• User-Generated Content– Reviews, photos, ratings

What’s the Problem?

Photo: Ingy the Wingy http://www.flickr.com/photos/ingythewingy/5740856803/

Much contemporary CMS-managed content and UGC is not simply static but changes application functionality

Made in Production ®

• Non-technical content authors– New pages, widgets, workflow

• End users– Graph connections, tagging

New Functionality

• Ideal: flow down new functionality and behaviour from Dev

• Reality: CMS and UGC introduce new behaviour and functionality directly in Production

What do Humble & Farley say?

“In most cases, don’t use dumps of the production dataset for testing purposes. Create custom datasets by carefully selecting a smaller subset of production data” p.344

... but not much more than this

Example Strategies

1. Remove the Problem– Avoid CMS– Decouple UGC

2. Embrace the Problem– Testing– More testing

Remove the Problem

• Ditch the CMS– Use plain HTML fragments + tooling– Flow down the pipeline– Package Management for

dependency graph

• Decouple UGC– JavaScript client-side integration

Embrace the Problem

• Front-end tests in Production– Use Staging?

• Identify new pages/features, extract, bring back– Track content with UUIDs

• Pre-live environment with data regularly synched from Prod

Content Flow: ‘Upstream’

Photo: Karen Miller, http://www.flickr.com/photos/tmtht/4029281127/

Other Approaches?

• Performance Testing?– Data dumps

• ‘Content Platform’?– ETL approaches

• (No correct answers)

Discussion Time!

Matthew Skelton@matthewpskelton

London Continuous Delivery meetup group:@londoncdhttp://londoncd.org.uk/