[opencms-dev] Best Practices for Setting up 'staging' environment for Content?

[Art Shectman]

Hi Allan,
Thanks for the info, I hadn't known about the Time Warp.

A few questions:

1.  Re: Time Warp, our application has generated XML files based on
available content, and that then reference actual assets like videos.(think
CMS managed desktop video player library), where a desktop app is fetching
lists of content over the 'web' (really, that's the XML coming from our CMS
about what content is available), and then that actual video assets from
OpenCMS.  Is there some way to tell our Application middle tier to make
requests to the DB in 'Time Warp' mode?  It seems like this setting effects
the OpenCMS admin tool to 'shift' it's date perspective, is there a way to
similarly shift the date perspective of the JSP libraries/application server
that is querying the CMS db?

2.  Can you expand on this, I'm not quite understanding. I suppose I don't
know what you mean by 'Online project' in contrast to static HTML?  We've
got a mix of dynamic data sets that the application server will return as
XML content lists that need to be controlled by content availability in the
CMS (like search, or user profile based content matches), but most of our
'category' lists or content lists can be generated and cached, and moved off
to the web tier as a cached XML file.  In that sense those can be 'static
html'.  However the underlying video and content assets would also be pushed
out to the real filesystem I supposed and served as static 'files'.  It's
the question of how to sync what should be showing in Staging/Preview vs
what has been approved to go 'live' that I'm struggling with.  Thanks for
the help!

3.  We'd 'sort of' looked at that, but that would make prod exactly equal to
staging, and we need to accommodate work in progress on staging that isn't
ready for primetime.  We're currently approaching the problem by looking at
customizing the 'synchronize' scripts that are meant to keep 1 CMS in sync
with another.  We've got a flag on all content of 'approved' and
'unapproved' that exists outside of the concept of
published/unpublished/publication start&end dates.  What we are thinking of
doing is running a sync script that looks for all approved content and makes
sure it's data and files are all pushed to the production server on a
nightly basis.  In this process we are careful to update the publication
dates of the production content as well to be sure we pick up any
publication changes (basically after the content sync we completely
regenerate the publication queue).  Then we look at all unapproved content
in staging and makes sure it is removed from the production server in all
locations, db, webserver cache, etc.

Thanks again for the info,
Art


Art Shectman
 
President
Elephant Ventures
http://www.elephantventures.com
C:917 714 3103
O:212 730 6710
F:917 591 2809

-----Original Message-----
From: Kim, Allan [mailto:jak009 at ucsd.edu] 
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 7:41 PM
To: art at elephantventures.com; The OpenCms mailing list
Subject: RE: [opencms-dev] Best Practices for Setting up 'staging'
environment for Content?

Having looked at the same thing recently, I'd suggest:

1. Content availability dates and the Time Warp feature.

2. Serving your live content as static HTML, and using the Online project as
your "staging" site

3. Totally speculative ... but you may be able to sync the two environments
by manually starting/stopping MySQL replication

________________________________________
From: opencms-dev-bounces at opencms.org [opencms-dev-bounces at opencms.org] On
Behalf Of Art Shectman [art at elephantventures.com]
Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2008 8:43 AM
To: opencms-dev at opencms.org
Subject: [opencms-dev] Best Practices for Setting up 'staging' environment
for Content?

Hi,
I'm a newbie to OpenCMS, and am trying to vet a design we are working on
where content will need to be 'staged' prior to being made publicly
available.  Basically we are trying to allow for the end client to be able
to preview what content will look like at a future date, or 'post-release'
when the current batch of to be approved content is released into our
production environment.

The solution we are converging toward seems to be to maintain two instances
of the CMS, one in staging where preview is driven from that we change the
server date on to allow for 'future views', and then a complex
synchronization script that syncs the current content snapshot of all the
currently 'approved' content with the Production CMS while removing all
'unapproved' content.  These concepts are separate from the
Published/Unpublished concepts in OpenCMS.

Has anyone set up something similar?  If so or even if not, any Project
Architects out there that would want to do 2-3 days of consulting to help us
vet our design?
Thanks in advance!
Art

Art Shectman

President
Elephant Ventures
http://www.elephantventures.com<http://www.elephantventures.com/>
C:917 714 3103
O:212 730 6710
F:917 591 2809