Deploying community from Sandbox to production

The deployment of communities if they are based on a Template its little different than normally how you deploy them .

Here are some of key learnings

  1. Deploy all metadata as you normally do ,but pay special attention to below as these are community specific

    i. SiteDotCom

    ii. Network

    iii. Communities_Shared_Document_Folder

    iv. CustomSite

    v. Topic_Shared_Document_Folder

Make sure to include all those in your package.xml and don't miss any of them as they are inter related

  1. For new communities note that you also need "AuraBundle" deployed if you have lightning components

Complete the deployment via ANT or force.com migration tool

  1. Use import mechanism from the Site assets. There is a blogpost on how to do this. Carry this step only after you deploy all metadata as mentioned in step 1 and 2

  2. There is a small bug with managed Topics currently, so all Featured and Navigational Topic I would recommend to create manually or use data loader.(I guess they still working on this to fix the issues)

If you use Force.com migration tool with latest jar that's the best bet.