Allright, so you know how to create features, deploy them as solutions; you also know how to deploy solutions; you think that solutions must be used only when you need to customize something outside of the box – like deploy your custom pages, webparts;
For your branding you use SharePoint designer and modify SharePoint pages when they are created; you also, think that SharePoint testing only makes sense for your custom solutions … well maybe some final click-throught at the end of the project; out of the box functionality doesn`t need to be tested; you think content must be provisioned manually by end users or if time permits by yourself.
Well, I hate to ruin this for you … but you got it all wrong.
Your solution: branding, customizations, content, pages, webparts, workflows, webparts, other modules like user controls must live together. They must be in single (in most cases) distributable package that you can deploy to your Test and QA and production environment. In fact, you should be able to build your entire solution with all of your customizations and deploy them to a clean machine runing SharePoint in a matter of minutes every time you need to have a build for a client. You should be able to run unit tests as you go on each build verifying all of those custom and out of the box pieces. That`s how stable and long term solutions are built; that`s when you see SharePoint enterprise-level deployment, doesn`t matter if your doing small scale deployment or actual enterprise deployment.
Want to know how to do all that and have a decent reference – register here and step up from one-man-consulting to decent-SharePoint-consulting.
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