What is the best way to remove/add/modify node structure in a live production environment?

[karthik4]

My AEM platform contains 3 websites of which contains lots of content. I need to remove/add/modify content nodes in production without affecting content authors and their daily tasks. What is the best practice and best way to remove/add/modify content nodes without affecting production content authors? How should I test this and go live?

[Jörg_Hoh · Accepted solution]

Have you tried content packages already?

[karthik4]

The Live AEM websites will be continuously edited by authors. I presume that the content packages will overwrite content that is being edited by production content authors. For example there are 50 pages that has child nodes that must be removed/added/updated. For example, adding a new property like a mixintype

[Jörg_Hoh]

So in other words: You need to do mass changes on the live authoring instance, and you cannot afford the export-modify-import approach, because it's likely that other changes are made to the same pages as well.

In that case you should thin in detail how you could automate these changes (from an algorithmic point of view, not yet implementation). And then think about how you can implement it at best. I would recommend to have a look at Sling Pipes.

[karthik4]

Thank you, but there's a solution I found online, using AEM Groovy https://github.com/icfnext/aem-groovy-console. Would this work? And also would writing a dynamic servlet work as well?

[Jörg_Hoh]

Of course you want paste any code into the groovy console and execute it. But honestly that's quite an risky process (given that you operate with copy&paste) and also not really reproducible. I would definitely search for a process which is less error-prone.