How accurate of a copy is a test portal?

[smondeau]

I was wondering if I could get any help out there with this especially if you may have some links on this particular topic. I just recently started using hubspot test portals as a test environment for our live version. The issue I am having is that the understanding of what these test portals can do in terms of copying and pushes to production is different between myself on the technical side and our Hubspot product owner so to speak who is more on the digital business side. Im having some difficulty explaining as after talking to a HS rep shes convinced of some things that from my side just isnt right (or i could be missing something). Most of these questions are in relation to what HS test portals can actually copy and do in relationship to the live environment.

If I could get some links to aid in explaining especially or some confirmation on these points it would greatly help aid in these conversations. For all of the below really is it really only possible via APIs. Or is there a UI that allows someone to accomplish these migrations?

1. From what I can see there is no one button type push to move content, templates (email or page - code and non code files), email, form, or workflow changes, creations, updates from one environment to another. From the live version to the test portal or from the test portal to the live version. Is that correct? That this is manual?

2. If I have templates for pages and emails in the live environment. I have to manually recreate those templates correct? I thought about turning them into coded files and then just copying and pasting over, but it means the test portal has changes being made to a coded file whille the live version has changes being made to a regular template which really are two very different files potentially.

3. Moving over of content settings, images, and all that good stuff is manual as well correct?

4. I did read there was a content type of staging area for some of these difficulties I am mentioning here, but where Im at the developer handles both this side of things AND the input of content. Also the type of stuff we are testing has some integration with our internal custom software so we are using the test portals to also test the API.

Thanks - any help and confirmation or correction here would greatly help.

[Derek_Gervais]

Hi @smondeau,

I'll answer each of your questions independently, but the tl;dr answer to most of these is that a test portal is not a copy/sandbox of a production portal. Test portals are completely distinct portals. Regarding your specific questions:

1. That is correct; there is no built-in transfer functionality to move content/objects/etc. between portals. The one exception here are blog/email/page templates; if you're a user in two portals, you can follow the steps in this Knowledge Base article to copy blog/email/page templates between portals.
2. See above: Email templates can be copied between portals
3. The template move functionality will also bring over the template's dependencies (i.e. images, stylesheets, etc.) but will not transfer any settings. That will need to be done manually.
4. I'm not entirely sure what you mean here. Content Staging is a tool used to prepare new content before replacing existing content, but I'm not sure it would be helpful to you. Here is the relevant Knowledge Base article, just for reference.

Let me know if you have any other questions!