Choosing the Right Publishing Tool

As mentioned previously, Liferay provides two alternative publishing tools: Publications and Staging. These publishing tools work in conjunction with Liferay's workflow capabilities to ensure that only thoroughly reviewed and approved content is made available in your sites. While both tools enable you to prepare and review changes safely without affecting end users, they use different frameworks and offer varying features. Here you’ll compare these tools and learn how to choose the appropriate tool for your organization.

Understanding Publications

Publications is a change-tracking tool designed for editing sites and content. It operates by creating isolated working environments that track changes to records within your Liferay instance. These are some key Publications features:

• Multiple Independent Workstreams: Users can create numerous separate publications, enabling different teams to work on distinct projects concurrently. This enables parallel content and site updates, as contributors can manage their own timelines and publish changes without impacting others.
• Company-Scoped Changes: Each publication is company-scoped, meaning it can group changes across multiple sites and asset libraries within a single Liferay instance. This is highly beneficial for large campaigns or widespread updates.
• Flexibility: Based on your configuration, you can allow users to freely switch between publications and production. This flexibility enables content contributors to work directly in production when appropriate or navigate between publications.
• Robust Collaboration: Publications provides teams with robust collaboration features. With them, you can invite collaborators to your publication, assign them unique roles, share comments, preview updates, and review a detailed change history. Also, during the publishing process, Liferay automatically checks for conflicts between your publication with production.

These features make Publications ideal for managing complex, concurrent content projects that require extensive collaboration and controlled release.

Understanding Staging

Staging provides a shared working environment for making changes to individual sites or asset libraries. When enabled, Liferay creates a separate copy of the original site or library. You can host this copy on the same server as the live environment (Local Live Staging) or on a different, physically separate server (Remote Live Staging). These are some key Staging features:

• Single Shared Environment: Unlike Publications, Staging offers only one working environment for all team members working in a site or asset library.
• Server Separation: Remote Live Staging is particularly notable for its ability to host the working and live environments on physically separate servers.
• Focused Scope: Staged changes are scoped to individual sites and libraries, and you can configure which Liferay applications to stage during setup.
• Staging Enforcement: You cannot edit staged application content in the live environment. Instead, you can only edit it the staging environment. Then, when your changes are ready, you can publish them manually or schedule them for publishing at a later time.

These features make Staging appropriate for managing site-specific changes, especially when physical server separation between environments is necessary.

Comparing Publications and Staging

Though both Publications and Staging serve a similar purpose, you can’t enable them simultaneously. Choosing between these tools requires a clear understanding of their differences and how each aligns with specific organizational needs. Consider these factors:

Publications is generally recommended over Staging for most use cases due to its superior collaboration experience, flexible project management capabilities, and greater integration with other Liferay features. The primary exception is when regulatory or security requirements mandate physically separate servers for your working and production environments. In this case, Remote Live Staging is your only option.

Clarity’s Publishing Needs

Clarity's fast growth and globally distributed teams, along with their needs for content governance, directly influence their choice of publishing tool.

• Collaboration and Parallel Projects: Different teams need to work concurrently on various projects. Given the scope of their changes and roll-out schedule, they need multiple working environments that are isolated from one another.
• Instance-Wide Change Coordination: As Clarity continues to develop additional digital solutions, they’ll need to coordinate instance-wide updates, grouping changes across multiple sites and libraries.
• Comprehensive Preview: Clarity wants to preview all of their content and browse their site experiences before they go live.
• Server Requirements: Clarity does not need to use physically separate server for their working and production environments.

Based on these requirements, Publications emerges as Clarity’s preferred publishing tool. It supports their need for multiple teams to work concurrently on various projects within isolated working environments. It also facilitates instance-wide changes.

Conclusion

Choosing the appropriate Liferay publishing tool for your organization is crucial for implementing an effective content management strategy. By carefully evaluating organizational needs against each tool's distinct features, you can implement a controlled and efficient content release process.

Next, you’ll explore how to manage changes with Publications before using the tool for yourself.