Handling customer content about unicorn

[kamsar]

Unfortunately there are some places during an upgrade where I'm pretty sure Sitecore disables event handling using EventDisabler, which causes Unicorn to lose some updates. Normally I try to leave system items out of Unicorn which mitigates this, but I've had to do on-disk merges of core db items when I have all of core synced, for example.

Unicorn 2 (currently in RC7) gets around this by using a data provider instead of event handlers, so it's not capable of being bypassed. Might be worth a try. I'm using it on a production project right now and it's been pretty stable so far.

In terms of having a serialized item set that is part Unicorn, and part manually serialized I don't have any magical advice. Usually when I have a situation like that I try to keep separate trees for 'dev content' and client content (e.g. /sitecore/content/sitename/home for customer content and /sitecore/content/sitename/metadata/enumerations for dev items). This lets you run a serialize tree from the admin to reserialize the manually tracked items.

[rootix]

In our project, we create the site skeleton for every site which has to be added. That means for example this structure

/sitecore/content/site
-> Resources
-> Configuration
-> Home Item -> Path excluded from serialization

Without that, we cannot configure the site correctly with its home item. We serialize this item manually to add it trough Sitecore Courier in an item package to the client installation. Another issue would be the right management because we cannot prepare the rights for that item in our development environment. Does do you create those items manually on the client systems?

[kamsar]

Generally we use packages to transfer content after initial launch, and occasionally manually triggered serialization to share dev content updates. It hasn't been a huge deal so far in our use cases.

In your particular case, Unicorn 2 supports ignoring fields for serialization so you could ignore the security field and keep the remaining parts of the item serialized. Since multiple configurations are supported you can have some of the security fields synced, and some not.

As to keeping the jagged tree serialized, it seems to me there are two paths to go down:

• Rely on source control and reverting to undo any bad updates (e.g. use Sitecore itself to reserialize the portions of the site that Unicorn traces using Serialize Item/Serialize Tree). Keep in mind that you can also make a copy of the old tree and use any diff tool to inspect and merge out unwanted changes in the files - then sync the unwanted changes out of Sitecore.
• Consider using v2, which should be more reliable in terms of storing items during Sitecore upgrades, as well as supporting a lot of scenarios v1 did not work that well with such as moving items across include/exclude boundaries, media files, etc.