In a recent post I mentioned that I had done the Cruise Against Hodgman decks. Part of this required me to get a website. So I put something together and have slowly updated it as I go. However, I am now thinking about expanding into more board game design. So my existing “hardcoded” website isn’t going to cut it.
I have started looking at using Umbraco, a CMS solution. I picked it because it was based on C# and MVC, which I already have experience with. It looks nice from the standpoint of being able to create Document Types with different data pieces and then a template that explains how to display it. I have a nice editor that allows me to easily tweak pages without republishing everything. Some of the other features look promising too, like setting publish/unpublish dates.
However, I am not sure how to work around some of the patterns I am used to. Being able to independently work on multiple different computers. The configuration on how the Document Types are setup are paired with files on disk that are created at runtime. This just makes it very hard to publish a site to a new location without wiping everything there.
Do you have a CMS system in place? How do you handle development, code changes, and publishing? How do you handle backup and restores?