Hi @karthik4 ,
I am going through this right now actually as we are doing an upgrade from 6.3 -> 6.5 and EVERYTHING is changing (using Core Components, upgrading to Editable templates, changing all our front-en, etc). This means that almost every node under /content is going to be transformed one way or another.
We have several environments of which PROD and UAT (one below PROD, also known as "staging"). The way we are performing the modifications is that we've developed a separate project called JCR Patcher which (as the name suggests) will traverse the JCR and patch every node that needs it 🙂 At the moment it is triggered via servlet, but it could also be done via command-line.
The plan is this:
- Copy all content from PROD to UAT
- Run JCR Patcher in UAT, test, get validation that all is okay.
- Content freeze (authors stop working)
- Copy all content from PROD to UAT (again, to get the delta, as step 2 will take weeks to validate)
- Patch PROD
- Validate
- Publish
- Un-freeze, authors can continue working on their new, patched content 🙂
The idea it to do as much testing in UAT as possible so that we can patch in PROD with high confidence. This way, step 6 (validation in PROD) is really just a "sanity check" that can be done in one or two days.
In your case, if you're only patching 30 pages (which is a matter of seconds), you wouldn't need a content freeze. You could do all your tests in your UAT environment and the schedule the patching at night.