Publishing Your Site
December 13, 2012 - Erica Capling
How to Publish/Un-publish an Asset
Troubleshooting Publishing Issues
Have you published something and still have not seen any changes on your live site? There could be several reasons for this.
Sometimes, publishing your entire site can take a few minutes. It depends on how much data you are publishing. To watch your publish job, click on the cascade menu (the swirly icon) at the top left of the screen, then choose publisher --> active jobs. You can then watch your publish job if it is taking longer than you expected to see changes. If you don't see it there it probably went through already, because many times publishing is very quick.
Try refreshing your browser. If you still don't see any changes, try clearing the cache in your browser and refresh the page again.
If steps 1 and 2 still don't show any results on your live site, there may have been a problem with publishing, such as a wrong password or quota issue. To see if there is a problem with publishing, click on home in the cascade menu (the blue bar) and navigate to the messages section of your dashboard. If there was an error, send it to us and we can let you know what the problem is.
You cannot publish blocks, because they are a piece of content that goes into pages. You can only publish pages, folders and files.
Publishing Tips
When the term publish is used, it is the same as transferring the file to the live web space via ftp. The WCMS usually uses ftp to publish the files. When the term unpublish is used, it is the same as deleting the file from the live web space via ftp.
Whenever you are deleting files, folders or pages, moving files, folders or pages, or re-naming the system name of a page (i.e. the url name, the name of the file in lower case on the left hand file tree), you need to un-publish first. If you do not un-publish first, the old file will remain on the server, and will be orphaned from your site, but if people have it bookmarked, they will still be able to access it. If you did something of this nature and forgot to un-publish, the easiest thing to do is to manually delete the asset using SFTP. We only recommend doing this if you absolutely have to.
Whenever you are doing something that affects navigation (i.e. adding, re-naming or moving pages), you will have to publish the entire site in order for the navigation to be correct on all pages. To publish your entire site, go to the base folder and publish from there.
If you would like to work on something and not have it publish, put it in a folder, and when creating the folder, uncheck "include when indexing" and "include when publishing". This will remove it from navigation and from publishing. Then, when it is ready to be a part of the site, you can edit the folder settings and re-check those attributes and re-publish your site. This is also very handy if you have seasonal or semesterly information that you would like to change. You would simply take the folders that need to be dormant, un-publish them, then uncheck include when indexing and include when publishing. Then you would navigate to the content that needs to be activated, edit it, and check the boxes to put it back into your navigation. With the new content active, you would re-publish the entire site. When they are ready to be used again, you would do the same process (un-publish folders that need to be removed, change the settings, activate new folders, re-publish site).
