Managing Changes with Publications

Publications provides a convenient and flexible way for teams to develop, track, and publish changes. Its intuitive user interface streamlines the process, making it accessible for all contributors. This article provides an overview on using Publications to manage changes.

How Publications Works

Publications operates differently from Staging. Instead of duplicating all content and synchronizing two separate datasets, Publications works with versioned records. It uses a database column to determine which content version appears on live sites. This approach allows users to create isolated publications, each grouping changes into distinct, publishable blocks.

Publications offers a flow more akin to a version control system:

• Sets of changes are grouped into a Publication.
• Each publication exists in isolation, so that changes made to one publication are not visible to others.
• Publications also have associated roles, so you can establish teams and grant users varying levels of access to different publications.

However, there is at least one important difference. If a user makes changes in production that don’t conflict with changes in the publication, Liferay automatically applies those changes to the publication.

This design enables complex, concurrent content management workflows efficiently.

Setting Up Publications

To begin managing changes with Publications, a system administrator must first enable it for your Liferay instance. This involves enabling the application globally through the Control Panel.

During this process, you can also configure these settings:

• Sandbox Only: When users log in, Liferay automatically directs them to their last working publication. If one does not exist, Liferay automatically creates one for them. Enabling this feature can help reduce accidental edits to production.
• Allow Unapproved Changes: Determine whether users can publish publications with pending workflow changes. By default, this option is disabled, which means that you can only publish approved changes. This helps enforce content governance and ensure all content undergoes proper review before it reaches production.

Once enabled, Liferay adds a publications bar to the top of the portal, providing quick access to publications in all portal contexts. You can use this bar to create publications, switch between working environments, and more.

Disabling Publications deactivates all active publications, cancels scheduled publications, and prevents immediate access to the publications history. However, Liferay retains your instance’s publication history, which becomes accessible again if Publications is re-enabled.

Collaborating on Changes

A publication is an isolated working environment that groups changes to your Liferay instance. Users with the appropriate permissions can create publications from scratch or use templates to standardize publication names and contributors. By default, only the publication’s creator can access it. But the creator can invite other team members and assign them specific contributor roles (e.g., reviewer, editor, publisher) that are scoped to the publication.

When working in a publication, any changes you make in a supported application are tracked by the publication. Examples include adding content, uploading assets, or updating pages. You can seamlessly switch between different publications and production without losing your work. This flexibility enables contributes to manage work and view changes in various contexts.

Best Practices for Collaboration

To optimize collaboration and minimize conflicts when using Publications, consider these best practices:

• Group Changes Strategically: When creating publications, consider how to group changes. Strategies include grouping by project, team, or release cycle. This helps maintain organization and clarity.
• Support Parallel Workstreams: Leverage the ability to create multiple independent publications. This supports diverse strategies for managing content rollouts and enables parallel workstreams across different sites and asset libraries.
• Avoid Overlapping Edits: To minimize potential conflicts, group changes to the same content within the same publication. Avoid using multiple publications to update the exact same items. This can help streamline the publishing process.
• Use Collaboration Tools: Encourage team members within a publication to share comments directly on changes. This facilitates collaboration during the drafting and review process.
• Track Headless API Changes: Keep in mind that any changes you make through headless APIs are added to your last active publication. So, before using APIs, ensure you are working in the desired publication.

Adhering to these best practices can significantly improve your collaboration experience.

Reviewing and Publishing Changes

Publications provide robust tools for reviewing content and site changes at any time before they go live. By default, the UI highlights your primary changes, though administrators can enable a detailed view that displays all system changes. You can also filter changes by multiple criteria (e.g., type user, site) and view changes side-by-side, both for content items and pages. Once you’ve finished your review, you can then publish your changes immediately or schedule them for a future date.

When the publishing process is initiated, Liferay performs an automatic check for conflicts between your publication and production. If there are any, Liferay prompts you to review and resolve them. While Publications resolves some types of conflicts automatically, others require manual intervention. During this process, you can discard changes, move them between publications, or revert previously published changes to resolve conflicts. See Resolving Conflicts for more information on each type of conflict.

Best Practices

To help ensure a smooth publishing process, consider these best practices:

• Publish Frequently and Incrementally: Publish changes frequently and in smaller, manageable blocks. This minimizes the scope of potential conflicts and simplifies the overall review and resolution process.
• Review All Changes: Always review all changes included in a publication before publishing to ensure accuracy and compliance.
• Integrate with Workflows: Workflows add a critical layer of governance. Generally, it’s best for reviewers to approve all changes before publishing them.

Adhering to these best practices helps streamline your publishing process, minimize conflicts, and ensure the integrity of your live site.

Conclusion

Publications offers a powerful and flexible system for managing content and site changes. This makes it an ideal tool for organizations with complex content governance needs, ensuring controlled and efficient publishing processes.

Next, you’ll use publications to manage changes for Clarity’s marketing campaign.