My Tridion VM bootstrap project

As part of my luxurious and privileged seat in Tridion Product Management I get to test new stuff all the time. It's great to just point my browser to the build server and download the latest nightly build (stable or unstable) and start playing around with it - how's the notification area behaving? Can I assign tasks now? How's the workflow engine doing? etc.

While this is great, it has a certain, heavy, repetitiveness to it. Every time I get a new build I need to either completely uninstall Tridion and start again (we obviously don't bother doing migration scripts between minor builds) or start from a completely new VM.

And this means:

• Create new blueprint
• Create new schemas
• Create new content
• Create new publication target(s)
• Configure Content Delivery for HTTP Upload
• Configure Website
• Configure Session Preview/Experience Manager

Even the most adept Tridion professional will recognize that this takes a LONG time to set up, and all to be destroyed soon, since a new build comes in tomorrow.

So I started, slowly, creating a series of C# command prompt programs to automate stuff for me. Initially these scripts would just create my diamond-shaped blueprint, a set of schemas, and some components. Then, I added a script to import content via RSS so I get some real content in it. Then, I expanded it to also create pages for these components. Then I added configuring the Publication Targets and Target Types. Then I added expanding the Tridion pre-build web applications and copying the configuration for these. Then I added actually creating the sites in IIS. Then I added support for all this to be configured via a XML file. Then I added changing the default templates to include Experience Manager building blocks. And finally I added support for Tridion 2011 too.


And now I decided to share it with everyone. The two projects I use to prepare my environments are available under MIT license on Google code.

There are 2 projects in here: CreateAnEnvironmentForMe and ImportContentFromRss. Each does what its name implies, and there's reasons why they are separate which I won't care to elaborate. I also offer no support whatsoever and really just hope the community can help evolve this solution to something a bit more stable. This code is not intended to be used in Production Environments, and there's no guarantees it will work for you.

These tools are tools I use, and they're fit for me to use them. If you need more rounded corners to use it, please feel free to change it - contact me via this forum or the google project if you want committer rights on the project. I typically run these projects from within Visual Studio, because I expect them to fail here and there, and this allows me to quickly fix them.

Hope this project can help others out there.