Here are some best practices for content management system feature usage in Liferay – Part 1.
- Separate the technical work of portlet creation, hooks, APIs, integration, themes, master templates and so on from content publishing work.
- Once technical work is done, setup publications feature on your production environment and publish using it. Refer: Publications – Liferay Learn
- Your workflow for publications should have content creators, reviewers, editors & publishers as bare minimum roles or you can adjust it as per your needs.
- Preferably, keep Production, Pre-production (Copy of production after scrubbing any PII in terms of CMS / content and technical components both), UAT which is technical replica not CMS content replica, integration and dev environments.
- Think of the content creation process this way: You don’t write a blog on one site and export from it and then import onto a new site which is your main blog, you write the draft on your own main site and put it through a workflow as required. Same applies to all largest publishers in the world, they don’t ask us to submit our journal papers, articles, conference proceedings, etc. to their UAT or pre-prod, we put content on their production systems and it goes through a workflow with right approvals, reviews and security permissions. Same applies to Wikipedia, we have a TALK/EDIT page for each of their topics right on the production system.
- Flow of content: CREATE/REVIEW/PUBLISH on production using publications. Then copy content after scrubbing onto pre-prod only for load testing and other needs. UAT, Integration and Dev are technical systems where development happens.
- Flow of environments for tech team: Copy of content after scrubbing PII (Personally Identifiable Information) onto Pre-Production, Technical components same as production on UAT but not content and then development servers with bleeding edge technical work.
- Many get confused and mix the content publishing and technical work by exporting / importing content between system environments. We need technical component similarity between all environments not content. Content has to be same across only prod and pre-prod after necessary scrubbing of PII.
- These practices will help you to smoothen & separate your technical and content management work properly.
- Refer: Content Creation is Not a Development Activity! – Liferay
- Email me: Neil@HarwaniSytems.in
- Website: www.HarwaniSystems.in
- Blog: www.TechAndTrain.com/blog
- LinkedIn: Neil Harwani | LinkedIn
