Long time SuiteCRM user here, coming from a Suite7 background where I built up a decent amount of muscle memory around Studio, Module Builder, Hooks and just generally how customizing traveled (or didn’t) between environments. Recently started poking around Suite8 for a new project and it’s been a bit of a learning curve figuring out what’s changed under the hood.
Right now I’ve got two environments set up, a dev instance where I’m doing the actual field and layout work, and a second one that’s meant to mirror it going forward. In Suite7 my workflow was basically: make the change in Studio, export the package, deploy it on the target, done (with the occasional manual double check because exports weren’t always 100% reliable).
Is that still the recommended approach in Suite8, or has the whole packaging/deployment story changed? I’ve seen some mentions of things being more file based now depending on what you’re touching, but I haven’t found a clear answer on what the actual best practice is when you just want to move custom fields, layout changes and logic hooks from one environment to another without breaking anything or having to redo it by hand.
Would appreciate hearing how others are handling this in a multi-environment setup, especially anyone who made the same jump from 7 to 8 recently. Is there a proper CI/CD style path emerging for this yet, or are most people still doing it semi-manually?