timberline wrote:I am trying to determine what advantage there was of using the panel instead of FTP.
Well, one could probably get into a page-long debate about exactly that. But first of all, just like any modern website application, X3 has stuff like titles, descriptions, content and settings, which cannot be applied by FTP. Just like any other app, we have to save these into advanced global- and page configuration settings.
As for the upload mechanism itself, it supports batch-uploading, preview images and realtime-resizing ... some features that FTP does not include. Certainly no specific reason why you would need to use FTP.
Finally, I am not sure how you would expect to fully
manage a modern website (x3) by FTP-only. Websites are normally managed from interfaces: create pages, upload images, add texts, add image captions, tweak advanced settings. Also, for users who are not familiar with the term "FTP", then a visual interface for editing pages and uploading images should be more welcome.
I am by no means
opposed to FTP myself. I am just making you aware of benefits of using the panel, as well as necessities of using it. With FTP, at best, you could create folders with page titles inherited from the folder name. You would not have titles, descriptions or custom content, until this is edited from the panel. Neither will you have specific gallery layout settings for a page created by FTP until managed by the panel.
timberline wrote:Scripting with FTP would be used to "automate" the process for them so anybody could do it with little chance of issues. I would also expect it to be quicker to run a shell script that would upload via FTP all the content from their local folders into the needed folders on the site.
If you want to setup an X3 website for a user who strictly wants to 1) synch a folder structure with X3, where the structure also works fine as a website menu, and 2) The user does not have any interest in editing any settings at all (which would be unusual), then yes this could be a logical approach. At some point though, someone would want to access the panel at least once, to setup default global styles, settings and preferably page defaults (layout options etc).
timberline wrote:Currently via a script, I zip the entire folder structure of test site, FTP that zip local, upload that zip from local to production site (we hope to go direct from server to server in the future) and then unzip it. Then all it seemed I had to do was clear the cache manually via the panel. Perhaps that could also be accomplished via the script by deleting the contents of the app/_cache folders???
Yes when moving from a test environment to production on a new location, you could do something like this. Personally, I use
RSYNC which is faster than FTP, because it uploads all files in a single connection instead of creating a new connection for each file like FTP. It would be similar to ZIP, except you would not have to deal with zipping.
ANYWAY, yes you could ZIP the entire folder structure, but you should avoid everything inside the _cache/ folder, as that would be unique per server location. After you upload and unpack to a new location, you should run {website}/?diagnostics, which makes sure X3 cache folders exist and everything that needs to be writeable, is writeable.