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

[Mathias Lin]

Hi Art,

where is the XML stored - in OpenCms? If you want to use the time warp, it's
probably important to use the OpenCms API to retrieve the content, rather
than a direct DB access, in order for the timewarp to work.

Generally I would have said, use the 'offline' and 'online' project mode for
the two site versions, but earlier you mentioned "These concepts are
separate from the Published/Unpublished concepts in OpenCMS. ". Why wouldn't
the built-in offline/online mode work for you, I didn't get that completely.

Instead of setting up two OpenCms instances, you might also just work with
two different sites in one OpenCms instance, since OpenCms support
multi-site. So you don't need to maintain two systems.


Mathias Lin
VP Products & Technologies
SYSVISION USA, INC.
www.sysvisionusa.com
Tel: 888-SYSVISION



Art Shectman wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 
> 

-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Best-Practices-for-Setting-up-%27staging%27-environment%09for-Content--tp19136042p19136663.html
Sent from the OpenCMS - Dev mailing list archive at Nabble.com.