SharePoint 2010Export Site as WSP

My question is related to SP 2010 and saving sites as templates. If I create a site, lists etc and save it as a template I can take the wsp and deploy it from envrionment to environment.

Is it possible to make changes to the original site, save it and upgrade the wsp in a production environment without completely overwriting any data that may already exist.

For example: I create content types and associate them to lists etc, save it as template and deploy the wsp开发者_开发技巧 to production. The users start entering data in production. Can I then make changes to the content type (like adding fields), resave the site and upgrade the wsp in production and have the content type changes reflected in the existing site?

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I am not sure this will work. And even if it appears to work, there could be strange side effects.

The problem is that each time you click Save As Template, SharePoint will generate new GUIDs for the solution package and features. They will have the same path names, so if you deploy the package as a farm solution, the new features will overwrite the old ones. But feature upgrading is based on the GUID and that will not match.

I would suggest that once you plan to upgrade, rather than recreate, sites based on a custom solution package that all future enhancements to that solution package be done through Visual Studio instead of through the template site.

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Jason - I was searching for answer for my question but could not find it here, However I have an answer to your questions.Yes you can do that, onnce you haev deployed a site on production, just use Export/Import to back and restore that site on Prod, it will just upgrade the things without overwriting the data. Give it a try!