Package Installation

Packages, Packages...
A colleague of mine ask me a question about installing packages today. And I wanted to post about the different options available when installing packages. The source of the information describe are from a great post by Martijn Van Der Put.

So when you are installing a package you will have the following screen - if the package is installing items present in the current content tree:

Well the best description for those options are (Thanks Martjin):

Overwrite	Items with the same ID (along with it's descendants) will be removed and replaced by items from the package.
Skip	Items with the same ID from the target database will remain unchanged; the item from the package will be skipped.
Merge - Clear	all existing versions for a language of the item being installed are removed prior to adding new versions. This options 'clears out' the versions of the language and creates one new version.
Merge - Append	item versions from the package are added 'on-top' of the existing versions of the item. This preserves history, but numbers the package versions with numbers higher than the existing version numbers. A user can merge information between versions afterwards.
Merge - Merge	if there is a version with the same number in the item, the Installation Wizard will overwrite it, otherwise a new version with the specific number is added. This makes it possible to replace specific versions of items.

So the important thing here is: If you create a package with the homepage only to do some update and you select overwritte then your entire content tree will be deleted...