Publishing

Owned by Zachary Restifo
Last updated: Mar 25, 2021
4 min read

Any changes you make in Tridion will not affect your site on the web until you publish. Publishing takes the latest saved versions of a page and any components on that page and updates the information currently on your site.

The following instructions will provide information on publishing content on your website through Tridion.

What You Will Learn

  • How to publish pages to the preview and/or live servers

  • How to track the progress of publishing with the publishing queue

 

Table of Contents

 

Publishing Pages

When you want to publish, select (but do not open) the page in your root folder, and then click the Publish button. To check on your publishing tasks, click on Publishing Queue.

 

To Publish a page:

  1. Go the Root folder of your site, and locate the page you'd like to update.

  2. Select the page that you want to publish (click the page once so it is highlighted in blue).

  3. Click the Publish button in the home tab at the top (highlighted in yellow above).

    • This will bring up a new page with publishing options:

 

When you click Publish, you will be taken to a new page with Publishing Settings.

 

Once you are on the new page for Publishing Settings:

  1. Select the Preview server and/or the Live server (highlighted above in yellow).

    • The difference between the two servers is described below.

  2. Click on the publish button (highlighted above in blue).

To view the page or pages you've published, load the page of your website that you've updated in your browser.

  • If you had the page open before publishing, you'll have to use the browser Refresh or Reload button to see the updated page.

  • It normally takes a few seconds for updates to appear on the preview server and a few minutes to appear live.

Unpublishing a page works similarly to publishing one, except that you click the Unpublish button.

  • Once a page is unpublished, it will not be deleted, but it will no longer appear in the site's navigation and the URL will be broken.

 

Publishing to Preview

After you've finished building or editing your site, you have the option to preview how your changes will look prior to going "live."

Each publication can be tested on the staging server by publishing to preview and then visiting the preview URL beginning with: "preview.yale.edu...".

If you are currently looking at the live version of your site which starts with "medicine.yale.edu" in the URL, you can access the preview version of the page by replacing "medicine" in the URL with "preview".

A list of URLs for YSM websites can be found here.

 

The general public does not have access to the preview/staging server. Only users on the Yale network or using Yale VPN can view the preview server.

  • If necessary, links to pages on the preview server can be sent to a colleague or supervisor for review before publishing changes to the live server which is available to the public.

 

Publishing Live

If you publish to the live server, whatever you selected to be published will be available for the public to see! The live server URL for your site starts with: "medicine.yale.edu..."

  • Steps for publishing to the live server are the same for publishing to preview. The exception, of course, is that you would select Live in the publishing window instead of Preview.

Whenever you publish to the live server, you should also check off and publish to Preview as well. This will prevent your preview site from becoming out of date.

 

Unless making a very small change, such as fixing a typo, it is strongly recommended that you publish to the preview server prior to publishing live, in case the page does not look exactly like you want it to. This way you can review your changes before affecting the publicly accessible site.

Only go "live" when you're ready and have received necessary approvals from those in your department who are involved with the site.

 

Using the Publishing Queue

Immediately after sending pages or sites to be published, you can check its status in the Publishing Queue. Look for the "Publishing Queue" icon in the home tab, and click on it.

You will be taken to a new page, shown below:

The Publishing Queue.

 

Once in the Publishing Queue, select your user name from the drop down menu to the left (highlighted above in yellow).

Click on Show Tasks to the right, and Tridion will populate all of the items you have sent to be published.

  • Most items take 1-2 minutes to be published, but if you have a considerable amount of multimedia content (such as images, videos or PDFs) it may take longer.

If the status reads "Success," your edits were published successfully! If it says "Failed," you will have to correct something on your page. Common scenarios that result in failures are:

  • There is a high volume of items being published in Tridion from several editors at YSM.

    • Try to publish during off-peak times, which are typically in the morning and early afternoon, and only publish one page at a time.

  • On the page you are trying to publish, there is a multimedia component that has the same file name as a different component you've used elsewhere on your site.

    • File names are different than the component names you enter when uploading multimedia content into Tridion.

  • There is an error in the page or structure group directory fields.

    • Check for extra spaces, mislabeled prefixes, etc.

If you cannot determine why your page is not publishing, please feel free to contact us.