Has anyone set up or have more details on Mirror Publishing Edition Types.
The Content Explorer Help and Standard documentation seem to be a little vague.
We have a requirement to set up publishing delivery to a Staging Server for Quality Assurance before publishing to the Production Server and I believe that the Mirror Edition type is what we require. Howeevr I would like some documentation to ensure this is set up correctly.
We understand the mirror edition is going to be removed from Rhythmyx but we still need to, for many projects, publish to a staging site so that not only Public, but Pending and Review content items are published. On the face of it this is relatively easy, but since we need to create a new site for staging, aswell as having the live site, confusion abounds with regard to cross-site linking/related content.
Is there a workaround for this, for example can we mark the “mirror” staging site as inactive but still publish it?
Andrew
Sounds like you want to use the Content Explorer - Site Explorer. We don’t use Site Explorer because of the need for a .war for each site, so I’m definitely not the one to espouse its benefits or functionality.
Maybe you already know, but there are some differences between mirror and staging publish, at least according to Percussion’s definition of what they are.
Mirror publish is to publish to a site/location EXACTLY what have been published before (from another site), even if some content has been updated since the first publish.
Staging publish is to publish the CURRENT revision of content, which may be in Public as well as other states (draft, review, quick edit, etc). If an item is in QE, production publish will publish the last public revision of the content, while staging publish is supposed to publish the current revision of the content.
Depending on what your workflow is like and under which states and revisions you want to publish content, mirror publish may not be the choice.
I am not sure if there is a way of marking the “mirror” staging site as inactive, short of taking out the column in the search result; but that will mean giving up cross-site linking…
We made a new publishable keyword value, s for staging.
Our Review and Pending workflow states are set to s - staging.
We have a new staging Item Filter which takes anything in p-Public and s-Staging.
Then is the bit we can’t get right.
We set up a staging site with a different publishing root location to live. It points to the same site folder as live, essentially 2 sites pointing to the same folder tree.
We have 2 sets of content lists, one for staging and one for live, one using the staging Item Filter and one using the public item filter. And 2 sets of Editions using each of the content list sets.
But, of course, cross site linking is the issue since these are 2 separate sites. And when we search for related content despite setting the staging site to Inactive in the Status drop-down we still have the option of selecting an item of content from either the Staging or Live site (what exactly does the Status drop-down do in Site set-up?).
The same issue is there when we set up a database publishing site, meaning that people can select related content from the database publishing site. This is after following the steps in the documentation fully. Database publishing content can’t be a separate workflow or any other workaround in that sense because it’s publishing out the core content people are contributing.
Essentially what I’m saying is the term “mirror” I shouldn’t have used - I meant staging.
Which is the bit that you can’t get right?
The settings you described about sites, editions, contentlists, which itemfilter to use, and a new publishable flag all sound correct to me.
I don’t have a good suggestion on the cross site linking issue at this point…