Considerations for Migrating Communities with Change Sets

Keep the following considerations and limitations in mind when migrating your Lightning or Salesforce Tabs + Visualforce community with change sets.

Available in: Salesforce Classic and Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise, Performance, Unlimited, and Developer Editions

General

For Communities, you can make updates only with change sets, which means that you can’t create a community directly from an inbound change set. Instead, in the target org, create a community with the same name and template version, and then deploy the inbound change set.
When you deploy an inbound change set, it overwrites the community in the target org. So although you can’t use a change set to delete a component, such as a community, you can delete the pages within a Lightning community. For example, let’s say you delete pages from a Lightning community in sandbox and then create an updated outbound change set. When you redeploy the change set in a target org, such as production, the pages are also deleted there.
If you update the community template in the source org to unify its Community Builder branding properties, ensure that the template is also updated in the target org before deploying the change set.

Administration settings are in Community Workspaces or Community Management.

Remember to add any new or modified profiles or permission sets referenced in Administration | Members to your outbound change set. They’re not automatically included as dependencies.
For communities created in a sandbox org before the Summer ’17 release, you must resave administration settings prior to migration to transfer them successfully.
Until you publish your community in the target org, settings for the change password, forgot password, home, self-registration, and login pages appear to return to their default values.
To update settings in the Members area and the Login & Registration area, you must deploy the changes in separate change sets. First update and deploy the Members area setting, and then update and deploy the Login & Registration settings.

Updates to recommendation names aren’t supported. If you change the name of a recommendation in the source org having previously migrated it, the target org treats it as a new recommendation.
Recommendation images aren’t supported.
When you deploy an inbound change set, it overwrites the target org’s scheduled recommendations with those from the source org.

The following items aren’t supported. Manually add them after you deploy the inbound change set.

Navigational and featured topics
Audience targeting
Branding sets
Languages
Dashboards and engagement
CMS Connect
Recommendation images
Branding panel images in Community Builder
The following Administration settings in Community Workspaces or Community Management:
- The Account field in the Registration section of the Login and Registration area
- The Settings area
- The Rich Publisher Apps area