Publishing-Templates and CMS - Carnegie Mellon University

Publishing

The publish queue is shared by everyone who uses the CMS. Depending on user traffic, it may take longer than you expect to see the published changes you make to your website. If you don't see your changes, check the publish queue rather than re-submitting your job. Re-submitting your job only clogs up the queue with redundant publish requests.

In rare circumstances, we reserve the right to cancel a submitted job if it has the potential to impact the stability of the entire system or compromise other users' ability to publish.  In that case, we will make every effort to notify you in advance so that you are aware and can prepare for alternate plans.

Publishing to the Staging Server

The staging server allows you and others to review your website content before it goes live. When you are first provided with a CMS site, your only publishing destination is cms-staging (the staging server).

Publishing to the Staging Server

Once your site launches, you will still have the ability to publish to the staging server as needed, however you will have to uncheck the live server if you want to publish to the staging server only.

Publish to Staging Server

Viewing your site on the staging server will give you a preview of what the site would look like on the live server. To view your site on the staging server, go to the following URL (be sure to change your-site-name to the name of your site folder in the CMS):

http://cms-staging.andrew.cmu.edu/your-site-name

Publishing to the Live Server

In addition to the staging server, live sites have the ability to be published to the live server (if your site has not been launched yet and it is ready to "go live", please follow the instructions for launching your site for the first time). Once your site is live, you will see the live server publishing destination, www.cmu.edu (if your site is hosted on an external server, you will see a destination for that server).

Publishing to Live Server

Large Publishing Jobs Should Be Done Before 9am or After 5pm

Large publishing jobs (e.g., site-wide publishes, publishing of large or numerous files) should be done outside of regular business hours (before 9am or after 5pm). Large publishing jobs may delay another user's time-sensitive publish job and can also put a load on the server and affect overall system performance. When possible, publish as small of a job as possible (i.e., publish individual pages or smaller group of files).

Instructions

Publishing Changes

During May 20-24, 2013, changes will be made to the publishing destinations of live CMS sites. Instead of publishing to two live servers (www-cmu-1 and www-cmu-2), there will only be a single live server to publish to (www.cmu.edu). This change may result in faster publishing times.

Publishing Tips

  • Large publishing jobs should be done before 9am or after 5pm
  • When publishing a newly-created page for the first time, you MUST publish the parent folder of that page to update the navigation throughout the published site
  • When publishing a parent folder, files within that folder will also be published
  • If you would like to rename, delete or a move an item, be sure to unpublish it first
  • If your publish job is taking longer than expected, check your place in the publish queue. Do NOT re-submit your job, that will only back up the publishing queue further.
  • Try to publish as small of a job as possible. It may be beneficial to disable publishing for certain items if it's not necessary.