Considerations when using SiteSync

Site Sync uses HTTP / HTTPS protocol to promote content between your Sitefinity website environments, so only firewall port 80 / 443 (respectively) should be opened. We strongly recommend using HTTPS for better security.

By default, SiteSync syncs redirect (both internal and external) pages in the same manner as any other page in your website. In case the page that the internal redirect page points to is not present on the target environment, the redirect page target will appear as Not set and the page will throw 404 until it is set to redirect to a valid page in the project.

By default, SiteSync promotes all language versions of a content item, you cannot promote separate translations selectively. SiteSync considers all language versions as inseparable part of the item.

When promoting Sitefinity CMS media content items, for example images, that are stored on an external blob storage provider, SiteSync updates only the content item properties (such as UrlName, Title). The binary content of the media item is not promoted by default. This enables you to share the same blob storage provider between the two environments, and have the binary content be stored in one place, while you use SiteSync to promote only the new content item properties or changes to these properties (for existing items). If you need to use separate external blob storage providers for your source and destination environments, you must promote the binary data alongside the content item properties. To do this, you can instruct SiteSync to promote external blob storage binary data as well by following these steps:

1. Navigate to Administration » Settings » Advanced settings » Libraries » Blob storage » Blob storage providers » <your provider> » parameters.
2. Add siteSyncBlobTransferEnabled as new parameter.
3. Set its value to true.
4. Restart the application.
5. Do this for both the source and target environments. 

When upgrading a Sitefinity CMS website, which is configured to promote content between its environments via SiteSync, you need to ensure you have upgraded all environments to the same Sitefinity CMS version, prior to using SiteSync. This is an essential prerequisite for SiteSync to operate correctly. If you try to promote content when the environments are running on different Sitefinity CMS versions, this will result in unexpected behavior and potential data loss. For more information about upgrading Sitefinity CMS, see Upgrade procedure.