Publishing to different boxes

Rhythmyx Technical Discussion
1

We have a single site and a one incremental edition that publishes our text data to external database and images to a shared location on one of our production IIS box. We want those images to publish out to two other IIS boxes during the same publish cycle . Can this be accomplished and how?

Pallavi

2

I do not believe it is possible to define multiple publish targets per edition; however, I would imagine it is possible to define multiple editions, each with a different publish target (though this is admittedly no it ideal). If it were me, I would define one edition and use external tools (like rsync in Unix, not sure what the equivalent on a Windows server) to sync the various destinations. I’ve talked to some other folks who have done this sort of thing to establish staging to pre-production environments.

Duane

3

Currently one has to set up ftp publishing credentials on a per-site basis. Meaning if you want to ftp site items to more than one ftp server you need multiple site definitions pointing to the same site folder with different credentials in each. I would love to see an enhancement to the system where the site specification allows multiple associations to ftp details and site variables associated to those details. Or, alternatively, allowing a specific edition to also specify “override” ftp criteria and publish variables which take precedence over the site defined values.

4

2 options:

  1. Publish to a single local filesystem location and use rsync to handle pushing the data to the multiple IIS targets.
  2. Set up 3 separate Editions, one for each target location – if you will always will be publishing to one location first, then the second and third can be Mirror Editions which do not require you to add to them any content lists… making configuration very simple, and forgettable.
5

The first option using rsync is very obvious

The 2nd option I am NOT sure how to “set up 3 separate Editions, one for each target location”? I do NOT think you can configure an edition with a specific publishing location. The publishing location is configured at the publishing site level, NOT the edition level

There is another side effect of setting multiple publishing sites to the same content explorer site, the content browser will display all the publishing sites. Also the template has to be assigned to publishing sites, NOT real content explorer sites. I am NOT sure if this is a desired feature.

6

Depending on network architecture… how about using a network share to have the same folder on all three machines? Publish once; images available on all.

7

Hua,

You are correct. Publishing locations is set at the Site level. When I said to set up different editions for each publishing target, I failed to mention that creating a Site for each edition was necessary.

I’ve not really experimented with your side effects. However, I have about 15 Site configurations pointing to the same //Sites/folder and I only see one site in the explorer. Perhaps this is something I’ll need to watch out for as my company upgrades from 6.5 to 6.7