Sitefinity Blank Login Screen

One on of my current projects, we’re leveraging the Sitefinity CMS for our front end. Initially the setup went really smoothly and I was off to the races. There is a ton to learn and a lot of the functionality is fairly intuitive. I was super excited about it until I tried to deploy some code updates to our Development/Integration Server.

We had already created a site on the development server directly and I didn’t need any of the content that I had created locally, so I figured it would be as easy as moving my code out to the DEV server. When I did this and went to fire up the site, I got a blank Login screen:

We went back and reviewed the windows roles/features that need to be turned on and everything seemed to look fine. I recopied the code over and over with no success.

Finally we did a folder compare between the initially deployed site on the DEV server and the code that I had moved. The only thing noticeable was that the GUID’s in some of the configuration files where different. That’s when I had a “Eureka” moment. I bet the Database that I had stored locally had to be moved as well because the GUID’s in the config files would have to match some data in the database.

I did a backup/restore from my local PC to the dev server and it worked!

Lesson learned: The website and assocaited databases can’t be swapped out ad hoc. There needs to be planning and strategy involved.

Hopefully this saves someone some time.

Enjoy!

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