Deploying Content From Staging to Production

In this scenario, the content can be developed in the staging environment and can be published to the production server. The WebSpace server provides a “Staging” feature for Community and Organization pages to address this requirement.

Essentially, the community and organization "staging" feature provides an option to deploy pages to the same server. Meaning, an administrator can review the page changes before publishing them and the publishing can be scheduled. In addition, a workflow can be attached to the process so the changes can be approved by an authority.

In the "Manage Pages" there is an option for "Publish to Remote" which would actually deploy the pages to a remote server. This can be the process for promoting the content that is developed in the "staging/development" environment to the production system.

Staging

You can “Stage” pages on the production server before they are published to live. This can also include the "approval process" of different levels of authority.

Here is how it works:

To Do Staging Without Workflow

1. Log in to Web Space Server as admin user.

2. Administrator or the owner of a community or an organization can enable Activate Staging via Manage Pages from the Control Panel.

3. Once staging is enabled, a user with appropriate privileges can add/modify pages and the content to pages and publish them when they are finalized. During the development of the pages while in the staging, live pages are not affected, and no changes are visible on live pages.

To Do Staging With Workflow

1. Log in to Web Space Server as admin user.

2. Administrator or the owner of a community or organization can enable Activate Staging and Activate Workflow via Manage Pages from the Control Panel.

3. Choose the number of stages for the Workflow. Default is 3.

4. Specify the roles for each stage of approval process. Administrator can create the roles with scope and permissions on the My Community portlet. For Content Creator Community Role assign the Manage Pages role from the Define Permissions option.

5. A Content Creator can create pages and submit the proposal. Once the pages are approved through the approval chain, the final approver can publish the page to live system.

Publishing to a Remote Server

Remote publishing allows publishing pages from a staging server (a staging server where the pages are approved and published locally) to production server. When using the remote publishing, the user who is publishing remotely must have a user account on both servers with the same email address and password.

The production server (where the pages are published to) must be configured to accept connections from the staging server.

For example, the following entry in portal-ext.properties would allow the remote publishing from IP address 192.18.123.38.

tunnel.servlet.hosts.allowed=127.0.0.1,SERVER_IP,192.18.123.38

If you have deployed the OpenSSO add-on, web.xml for the tunnel-web application should be configured in such a way that "Liferay Servlet Filter" and "Secure Liferay Servlet Filter" are using the default filter which is com.liferay.portal.servlet.filters.secure.SecureFilter instead of the filter that ships with the add-on which is com.sun.portal.servlet.filters.soo.accessmanager.BasicAuthFilter.

Offline Promotion of Content to Production

The remote publishing feature is very useful when staging and production environments are "connected". In case, they are not connected, meaning the network firewall prevents any connections from staging to production due to the company's security policy then the remote publishing will not be an option. In this event, the pages can be promoted to the production "offline".

After the pages and its content are finalized, an administrator can "export" the pages from staging environment which will generate a lar file. The same can be copied over to the production server and imported into its corresponding community/organization. The "Manage Pages" option for a community/organization contains a tab for "Export/Import" which allows an administrator to export or import the page including its content, permissions and the like.