Best Practices for Managing Publications
Efficient publication workflows in Liferay help improve collaboration, reduce errors, and streamline content delivery. Follow these best practices to minimize conflicts, optimize the publishing process, and ensure consistency across your projects.
Avoiding Conflicts
Conflicts occur when changes to publications overlap with content in production or other publications. To prevent disruptions and maintain control over your content, follow these strategies:
Work in Publications, Not Directly in Production
Make changes within publications to use version control, auditing, and rollback features. Editing directly in production bypasses these safeguards and can lead to issues. For example, direct deletions might skip the Recycle Bin and make recovery impossible. Avoid working in production whenever possible.
Target Unique Assets in Each Publication
To prevent overwriting changes, focus on unique assets for each publication. The latest published version of an asset appears in production, so multiple publications that affect the same asset can cause conflicts. Use the publication toolbar to track changes and asset history, avoiding overlap.
Managing Page Edits
Pages are treated as single assets. Edits to a page in production conflict with modifications in a publication, even if the changes are unrelated. To prevent overwriting, duplicate the page for publication edits. After publishing, update the friendly URL to preserve the original page. This keeps changes isolated and minimizes disruption.
Team Coordination
Communicate clearly with your team to avoid overlapping changes. Coordinating major updates reduces conflicts and prevents redundant work.
Restricting Access to Sensitive Assets
Set permissions for critical assets to prevent unauthorized changes. Restricting access ensures only authorized team members can modify important content, reducing potential conflicts.
Resolving Conflicts
Even with the best efforts, conflicts may still happen. When they do, having a clear strategy for resolving them quickly is important. These practices help you address conflicts during the publication process.
Handling Conflict Alerts
If a conflict occurs, contact the publication owner to determine how to proceed. You can integrate your changes into the existing publication or wait for them to be published before making your own updates. This prevents overwriting content.
Regular Conflict Monitoring
Regularly review key assets to catch potential conflicts early. This proactive approach helps resolve issues before publishing and prevents delays. Also, monitor the Recycle Bin for restored assets that could affect the publication.
Optimizing Publication Size and Use Cases
Understanding publication size is key to managing the publishing process. Since conflicts can’t always be avoided, knowing how large your publication is helps you plan changes and set realistic expectations for publishing timelines.
Small Publications
Small publications usually involve minor updates, like content changes or quick fixes. Publishing in small batches reduces conflicts and speeds up the process. However, managing the growing publication history is important to avoid clutter.
Medium and Large Publications
Deploying major updates or redesigns in large publications requires careful planning:
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Schedule publication deployment during off-peak hours to reduce server strain and minimize conflicts.
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Notify content editors about upcoming changes to avoid redundant work.
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Conduct a thorough review to check for issues such as broken links or misconfigured assets.
Performance Optimization
Regular maintenance is essential to optimize publication size and frequency and ensure smooth operations.
Periodic Cleanup of Publication History
If historical records aren’t essential, clean up old publications regularly to improve performance. Delete unnecessary publications to maintain efficiency, especially for large teams or frequent publishing.