Feather: Overview of Feather deployment

With Sitefinity Feather, you can leverage Sitefinity ASP.NET MVC technology for a simplified development. Sitefinity Feather introduces a modern, convention-based, mobile-first UI framework for Sitefinity CMS. Feather enables developers not only to build mobile-ready sites using frameworks of their choice but to deploy and upgrade them with ease. The main areas in which you can leverage Feather for your deployment process are the following:

• Versioning of your widget assemblies
• File based upgrades of your dynamic content packages
• File based upgrades of your custom packages
• Pages precompilation

With the ASP.NET MVC technology your views must reside in your Sitefinity Web app project. This makes it complicated to manage and keep track of all your custom widget’s views. 

Feather enables you to have ASP.NET MVC views outside of your Sitefinity Web application project. This means that every custom widget can be contained in its own assembly, including its views. This makes the managing of your widgets easier, since with every change or modification, you only need to drop the produced widget assembly in the bin folder of the Sitefinity Web application. You do not need to rebuild the entire Sitefinity web application. You can also have versions of your widget assemblies for even more convenience.

For more information, see Feather: Develop widgets.

Feather packages are the best way to manage the looks and feels of all widgets - stock, custom, or dynamic. For example, you may want to customize the default Feather widgets that are created for your dynamic types. There are several ways for overriding dynamic widget templates, but the best one is to place your view in the desired package folder in the file system.

This way, when you alter your dynamic content view, all you need to do is to override the file on the file system. The alternative precompiling of the embedded views or updating the view in the database requires greater effort.

For more information, see Feather: Dynamic content.

After you enhance a custom widgets, you often need to change the widget template. 

Leveraging Feather packages you can place your custom widget templates inside the package, instead of embedding them in your custom widget assembly or making changes in the database. This enables you to have upgrades of your views without building, including your designer views – you need to override the view file in your file system.

For more information, see Feather: Frontend packages.

After you deploy the latest version of your widgets, templates, or packages, you can use Sitefinity Precompilation tool. This will load the first requests to your new widgets, templates, or packages faster. It is also used to warm-up your site when it is initially hosted. 
For more information, see For developers: Precompilation of pages.