Considerations for Deploying 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 (not available in all orgs) and Lightning Experience

Available in: Enterprise, Performance, and Unlimited Editions

General

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, ensure that you also update the template in the target org before deploying the change set.
You can’t deploy to a target org that’s using an earlier release version. For example, if your source org is on Summer ’19 (API version 46.0), you can’t deploy to a target org on Spring ’19 (API version 45.0).

Administration settings are in Experience 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 before 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.

For menu items that link to objects, list views are reset to the default list view. Also, custom list views for standard objects aren’t included as dependencies.
Deploying the navigation menu with additional menu items deletes any translations applied to existing menu items in the target environment.

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 recommendations 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
Dashboards and engagement
Recommendation images
Branding panel images in Experience Builder
The following Administration settings in Experience Workspaces or Community Management:
- The Account field in the Registration section of the Login and Registration area
- The Select which login options to display option in the Login section of the Login and Registration area
- The Settings area
- The Rich Publisher Apps area