Are there any actions that affect both the production and development pages in Customer Portal?

Environment:

Customer Portal (CP)
Oracle B2C Service

Resolution:

For the most part the development sandbox is entirely independent of the production site, however there are some actions that affect both the development pages and a production site.

Here are the actions that affect both Customer Portal deployed pages on a production site and the development pages:

• Editing anything in the assets folder (css, images), with the exception of themes. This also includes editing the stock announcement.html file (instead of creating a custom one and updating the page to reference the custom one). Themes are an important exception, as they are the only files in this directory that are not shared by the development and production files. These files are used strictly by the development files. When you stage the development pages, these files are copied to a time-stamped folder in the staging directory and called from that folder. The themes you develop are kept in this isolated sandbox that cannot be accessed by production files. The themes are applied to your production site only when you promote the staged files into production.
• Editing message base values
• Editing configuration settings
• Editing custom reports that are referenced in both the production and dev pages.  For example, if you copy report 166 to generate report_id 101123, if you reference 101123 in your deployed pages and in the development pages, any changes you make to report 101123 would affect both sets of pages.
• Editing anything else stored in the database, i.e. editing things from the Administration Console.  This includes editing answer content, adding or editing products and categories, adding or editing custom statuses.

Any changes made to the files in the development folder affect only the development pages, until you deploy them. Changes made to files in other folders may affect both development and production pages when you upload them, without deploying them.