FTP Publishing From WebMatrix (and FYI on Publishing Log)

After seeing a tweet from someone this morning, it occurred to me that I haven't personally tested out the FTP Publishing experience of WebMatrix yet. So, I did. :) I cranked up WebMatrix and my Orchard CMS build then adjusted the Publish settings to use the FTP information of my Cytanium (cheap shared Windows hosting) testing account. It was actually just as smooth as possible - smoother than I expected actually.

One potential "gotcha" is to be sure the Site Path is set correctly. At Cytanium it is possible to define an FTP user's home folder when managing FTP accounts. If the home folder is set to your site root (\\<website>\wwwroot) then the Site Path should be left blank since it will write exactly where the FTP account lands after logon. But, if the FTP home folder is just set to <website>, and that isn't the web root, the Path needs to be adjusted. In this example, on my Cytanium account, with the FTP root going to <website> I would set the Site Path in WebMatrix to \wwwroot.

Something else I noticed while watching the publish is that WebMatrix has a publishing log. To view the log just click the "log" link near the bottom of the IDE while the Publish operation is running.

That brings up this nice detailed log file that updates live while the Publish is taking place.

When it's done, it tells you so. :)

Pretty cool.

If you don't already have a hosting account that supports Microsoft's WebMatrix, go to Cytanium and check it out. Cytanium supports ASP.NET, Razor, PHP, MVC, SQL CE, and MUCH more!

Happy hosting!