Hi, Please move this topic to a proper section... not sure does this belong in here :) So, is there a way to keep developing new features, modifying existing ones, change page layouts, change content types etc. basically keep doing everything that is a part of the process of creating new site definition and everything that's in it AND preserve the old content without spending time in writing code that does the updates on the site collection. Can this be solved with backup/restore so that we can backup the existing content -> delete the site collection and create it again -> restore the content? I know I'm just wishing for some magic to happen... but I'm asking anyway.

Hi, Do you have a staging or development environment, or you are only having a production? Best Regards, Ammar MCT http://ahmed-ammar.blogspot.com Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

We do have development & staging. The (preferred) process would probably go so that developing goes as usual delete/create sites without worrying about the content but in the customers testing environment we'd want to preserve the content and from there move it to production.

Hi,I hope the following article answer you http://blogs.technet.com/josebda/archive/2007/07/20/back-to-sharepoint-applications.aspxif not, please feel free to ask and clarify your caseBest Regards, Ammar MCT http://ahmed-ammar.blogspot.com Posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Thanks, I guess that's good enough and there's no way (at least supported one) to go around any possible problems with some backup/restore-process, leaving only upgrade definition files to work with. I can't say that I have any real experience about these upgrade definitions... any tips about using these? For example, does upgrade definition files help with the following: I've deployed and created sites I modify some of my page layouts Now pages display any changes I've made to the layouts (ghosted) I modify the page The unghosted page doesn't display any changes made in the 2nd step (this worries me some, why it doesn't take the data in the file atm. to the database) I see here so many things to forget, not know about etc. that this would require some strict guidelines and processes at the very beginning of the development. Forecast: FAILURE :) ps. (I'd like to keep this discussion open even though I marked Ahmed's post as answer, thanks for that).