Set Up and Manage Publishing Features Like a Pro

Ingeniux CMS has many powerful publishing features. Following these tips will help you manage the Ingeniux publishing system according to best practices and ensure your content gets delivered how and where you need it.

After Testing Your Publishing, Start Fresh

When you are developing a new set of content that will eventually become a website or other content delivery application, you often need to publish many times for testing and QA. You might also publish when testing out the publishing settings themselves to ensure that you have set up the CMS correctly and your published content is delivered as desired.

When you’ve completed testing your publishing settings and targets, it’s a good idea to delete your test publishing target and start fresh with a new publishing target for your first real publish. This will get rid of your testing history, superfluous content, and URL history. You’ll then be able to start publishing from your new site from a clean slate.

Watch the tutorial on testing your publishing targets.

Set Up Staging and Live Publishing Targets

It is our recommendation that Ingeniux Admins set up two publishing targets for each of their delivery targets: a staging publishing target and a live publishing target. Using a staging publishing target allows users to test their published content outside the CMS for things like accessibility and responsiveness without the barrier of the CMS interface surrounding your content. It also helps ensure that when you do publish to the live publishing target, your content will appear as expected with no unwanted surprises.

You will want to ensure that your staging site is always in sync with your live site, so make sure that everything you mark for live also gets marked for staging. It’s ok to have things on staging that aren’t live, but the other way around can cause some major confusion.

Run reports in the CMS to help users find discrepancies between staging and live sites so that they can be synced. We recommend running these on a regular basis to ensure your environments are synced. The results from the report can be sent directly to your email from the CMS.  

Watch the tutorial on how to set up publishing targets.

Cover Your Assets

With the release of Ingeniux CMS 10, assets became “first class citizens” in the CMS. In other words, they now have all of the management and publishing capabilities that pages and components have in the CMS. This means they can be checked in, marked for publish, and published to individual publishing targets.

With this asset functionality, users have more control over how and where their assets are published. This is critical for those working with a CMS that is producing multiple websites, such as a public site and an intranet or portal.

You will want to make sure that you have processes in place for taking this into account, and you have trained users with the proper security and permissions or provided adequate workflows that facilitate the process on their behalf. This is an especially important consideration when upgrading a site from a version of the CMS before CMS 10. Take the time to reorganize your assets before the upgrade, making sure they are marked to the proper publishing targets.

Watch the tutorial on managing and publishing assets.

Understand the Difference Between Incremental and Full Publishes

Incremental publishes publish new content to the selected publishing target and update existing content based on how you’ve prepared it in the CMS. For example, if you’ve unmarked something for publish and perform an incremental publish, that content item will stop appearing in the publishing target URL, though the physical files will still be on the server taking up space and processing power.

Only a full publish will remove content items from the server, so it is a good idea to do them on a regular basis. The same is true for search indexes. Your incremental publishes add new content to the index but don’t take it away. Keep in mind that full publishes will take longer than incremental, so plan on doing them in downtime when there is little CMS traffic.

Watch the tutorial on understanding the difference between incremental and full publishes.

Lock it Down with the Proper Security

Using security to lock down your publishing targets prevents unwanted check-in, mark for publish, and publishes. It also controls custom URL settings and redirects from being set to the wrong publishing targets. With this ability, you can let your users access the staging publishing target without being able to access live so they can test out their desired settings without directly issuing those to the live environment. After they have tested their settings a high-level user, like an Admin, can push those settings to the live environment.

Watch the tutorial on how to set security on publishing targets.

Ongoing Maintenance

It’s really important to clean up your content on a regular basis. This includes things like running audits and archiving or removing old content.

Very often people remember to unmark their pages, as these are the most public facing items, but neglect to check on which components and assets the pages were using but aren’t needed on the site any longer. That also means that you need to audit links to those items that you are removing and remove the links to them as well.

Ingeniux CMS is set up to remove those links from view in most cases, but to be absolutely sure that you remove all broken links on your site we recommend using the Find and Replace Tool regularly to find broken links, locate them in the site, and remove or update them.

Watch the tutorial on ongoing CMS content maintenance.

As you have used the Ingeniux CMS what have you discovered helped with managing your publishing? Share your ideas with us in the comments!