Cloud Connected

Thoughts and Ideas from the Gitana Development Team



Requirements for CMS Publishing

Aug 5

What does "publish" mean?

In a CMS, publishing means moving content from a draft state to a published version. It will update the content on the published target(s) with the changes made since the last publish date. This sounds simple enough but the requirements for publishing are usually far more complex and interesting.

What Publishing must do

  1. Publish must work
    Seems like this is stating the obvious but it is critical. Must be able to confidently publish desired content to the right place and at the right time.

  2. Collaboration
    Publishing is usually more than changing the status on content from “draft” to “live” status. Changes to content often need to occur together and therefore get published together. Alternatively some changes are independent of other changes and should be published separately. Supposing you have an update scheduled to occur every hour in a day, e.g., product updates on black Friday. The ability to separate each scheduled release to review, maybe to cancel or update, are all perfectly reasonable requirements. Cloud CMS uses Editorial Tasks (a mini branch) to collaborate on changes, when finished the Editorial Task is published now or in the future. This is a perfect mechanism to collaborate on content and then publish as required.

  3. Related content / Structured Content
    A simple example: edit and publish a news article. The news article also has related content such as images. When publishing the news article any related content should also be published otherwise the article would appear broken on the target. It may be difficult for the editor to know all the related content and could be very difficult as a manual task to determine what needs to be published. In Cloud CMS the relationships are defined in the Content Model. Therefore, when content is published in Cloud CMS, the related content is also published. Note: the publish will only publish content that has been updated and the related content that has not already been published

  4. Scheduling
    Content needs to be published either immediately or at scheduled in the future. This may be a single change, a small group of changes, or a major campaign or launch. Often content need to be published at precise times, prepared in advance, reviewed. With Cloud CMS there are no limitations. You can schedule for any date/time in the future. You can even add your changes in to an existing scheduled release. You can review your scheduled changes and even go back to past scheduled releases to review what was in that release.

  5. Accurate and Timely reporting and status
    When content is published (or scheduled to be published) the editorial team needs to know the status: whether scheduled, or the content is successfully published on the target, or whether there are any errors.

  6. Merge Conflicts
    A Conflict occurs when any two users make changes to the same piece of content such that their changes are incompatible. In Cloud CMS when a user tries to publish the conflicting change, Cloud CMS identifies the issue and asks the editorial team to determine which of the two sets of changes to keep. We also have an option to allow for a merge conflict to always accept the latest change.

  7. Multiple Publishing Targets
    What if you need to publish:

  • different content to different targets?
  • the same content to multiple targets?
  • Large and frequent publishing to various targets.

Cloud CMs publishing let you define deployment targets and then within the project define the publishing strategies. Therefore, the editor can automatically publish to the desired targets without the need to call devops.

  1. Workflow Approval process
    Usually, some level of review and approval is required in a publishing process.
  • Preview changes
  • Track changes
  • Comment of a set of changes
  • Finally, approve or reject (or cancel) With the Cloud CMS publishing Workflow Comments can be added and workflow events defined. Changes can be reviewed at any time and a preview option is available for a branch (in this case either the editorial task or a schedule release are branches so they can be previewed)
  1. Priority of content publishes
    Some content publishes are more critical than others. Eg., news alert that must go out now, a message for the CEO, an external site update is more important than an internal site update. With Cloud CMS we address this issue is a number of ways:
  • Making the publish as efficient as possible
  • Job Bandwidth: reserving bandwidth for certain projects, jobs, users
  • Job Queues: additional queues for certain projects, jobs, users

More information

With Cloud CMS we try provide solutions for now and the future. We do not want you just meeting 60% or less of your requirements or to be limited in your use of the CMS. We want you to meet all your requirements now and in the future. Our Publishing Solution has grown with our experience and our customers feedback. If you want to find out more, demo, request a free trial please contact us at info@cloudcms.com