Determining a Liferay Publishing Strategy

Determining a publishing strategy is crucial for starting Liferay projects effectively. A well-defined strategy guides the content contributors on how to publish content, assets, pages, and any other website component. Implementing a strategy from the outset ensures teams comply with your requirements and follow consistent procedures for content releases.

Key Considerations for a Publishing Strategy

The first step in defining a publishing strategy is gathering and analyzing all company publication requirements. These requirements help you identify the optimal process for releasing content to end users. Throughout this process, here are some key considerations:

• Roles and Responsibilities: Assess the number of individuals and teams collaborating across each publishing stage, define who owns tasks and approvals throughout the publishing lifecycle, and identify key stakeholders who should receive status updates.
• Automation and Scheduling: Identify which tasks you can automate (e.g., approvals, notifications, content routing). Also, determine if you’ll need to schedule releases for specific dates and times (e.g., to avoid peak traffic hours).
• Version Management: Also, assess the need for maintaining a detailed history of content changes, accessing previous versions, and managing multiple, independent content projects that you can develop and publish concurrently.
• Publishing Process Flexibility: Determine if all teams and content types should use the same release workflow, or if they require different release workflows. 
• Regulatory Requirements: Consider whether you need physically separate servers for your working and live environments (e.g., local vs. remote).
• Update Cadence and Complexity: Evaluate the expected frequency, scale, and complexity of content changes.
• Team Experience: Assess the team's familiarity with publishing tools and version control systems.

These considerations directly guide the selection and configuration of Liferay's publishing tools and processes. As a general principle, prioritize simplicity; you should pick the least complicated solution.

Content Publishing and Code Development Environments

When determining a content strategy, it’s important not to conflate content publishing with code development. Code development necessitates separate Liferay servers (e.g., DEV, TEST, UAT) for building and testing before deployment to production (PROD). This is to isolate development work and ensure thorough testing before release. By contrast, content authoring, review, and publishing are business as usual (BAU) activities that should always occur directly within the PROD environment.

Liferay's publishing tools (Publications and Staging) operate within PROD, providing the necessary governance without the complexity of migrating content through development environments. Forcing content creators to author in development environments only creates unnecessary complexity and introduces potential liability.

Choosing Your Liferay Publishing Tools

Understanding your specific requirements from the key considerations above will guide the selection of Liferay's publishing tools. Liferay provides features that address diverse scenarios:

• Workflows: If your project requires automating task assignment, approval processes, notifications, or other business logic, workflows are the ideal approach. They are highly configurable, and you can assign define and assign different workflows for each asset type. You can use workflows with Liferay Publications or Staging.
• Publications: If multiple teams need to work on different projects concurrently, requiring isolated working environments for review before a collective publication, Publications is the best choice over Staging. They support multiple parallel 'publications' that can group changes across multiple sites and asset libraries within a single Liferay instance. It also provides robust collaboration tools, change tracking, publishing history, and more. Hence, Publications is generally recommended over Staging.
• Staging: If you must have physical separation between your working environment and your live environment, Staging (specifically Remote Live Staging) is the solution. Generally speaking, Staging is more suitable for less frequent, smaller publications managed by a smaller, experienced team. If external regulations mandate physically separate servers, Staging is your only option.

It is important to note that you cannot enable Staging and Publications simultaneously. You can only use one of these two tools. That said, you can use workflows with either Publications or Staging to define a comprehensive governance model.

Clarity Vision Solution’s Publishing Strategy

With these principles in mind, you can apply them to Clarity Vision Solutions. As a fast-growing international company, Clarity requires clearly defined teams and roles to manage their content effectively. They need automated procedures for content and asset approvals, with timely communication to their globally distributed teams. The ability to preview content and entire sections in a non-production environment is essential for team collaboration. Clarity also seeks flexibility in their publishing process, accommodating varied restrictions for different teams or assets.

Given multiple teams collaborating, maintaining a detailed history of content changes, accessing previous versions, and comparing published content are crucial requirements. They anticipate frequent updates as content is implemented, rather than adhering to a restrictive publication schedule. Importantly, Clarity has no regulatory or security requirement for physically separate servers for their working and production environments.

Based on these requirements, Clarity plans to leverage workflows for their content approvals and Publications for their publishing tool. This choice supports their need for different teams to work concurrently on various projects within isolated working environments, ensuring changes are thoroughly prepared before collective publication to the live site.

Conclusion

A well-defined publishing strategy is foundational for effective content management in Liferay. Liferay offers robust tools like workflows for approvals, and Publications or Staging for managing content across working and live environments. By strategically leveraging these capabilities, organizations can implement tailored publishing processes that ensure high-quality content delivery. 

Next you’ll review what you’ve learned before moving on to the next module.