I have the same problem and I have raised a bug (actually, several bugs) about this. The response I got was that a feature request has been raised, but I think I will follow up as this is an issue that is causing us some problems.
For most of our projects, we have several destinations set up - a test site, a UAT site, and the production site, and in some cases, a production site in each of our major global regions. During development we do a lot of builds to the test area, and only when it has been reviewed and approved do we build and publish to the production site. In Flare 11, to publish to a production server, you have to set this on the target and save. If you then make updates that you just want to test, you have to remember to update the target, but because we were used to the old method and just clicked publish expecting the dialog, the process sent the output to the last one used (eg, production). Luckily, we had backups, etc, but the process is more time consuming and prone to errors.
Sometimes you do a local build, check it, then you want to publish to several sites (say Test and UAT) rather than just one - you should be able to select your destinations at the point of publish, not before you build.
On using build and publish to test this, I ended up raising a few more issues that I think are related. Let me know if you have the same problems - you never know, someone else may have asked for a direct publish feature and that is why this process changed.
The issues are:
- Publish function should pop up the destinations dialog and NOT copy files directly to the last destination used.
- If no destinations are selected on the Target, the Publish crashes - it should definitely pop up the dialog in this case. Of course, if other people do want a direct publish option, I can work around this by having no destinations selected in the target which should then prompt.
- Don't rebuild as well when Publish is selected (this one has been registered as a bug).
- Provide a Save As option to save the log file (currently overwrites log and only saves the last one)
- The Publish log should indicate which destination it is putlishing to - if you publish to multiple sites (like all production regions), you can't tell what has been uploaded to where.
- Highlight the most recent build or publish activity in the Build window rather than the previous one in the list.
- Show the build log as it is processing. While I like the build in background feature, for large projects it was always nice to see how far it had got by watching the build window.