Assets that you work with in Merchandising must be published to your live sites along with any other items necessary for running the sites. These necessary items include individual pieces of content, images, style sheets, and the Web pages themselves. The process of publishing assets from a development environment to a live site is managed by ATG Content Administration. The following are some key terms that you need to be familiar with when you work in Merchandising projects:
Project: ATG Content Administration controls the lifecycle of items that are published to your Web sites through an entity called a project. A project contains a set of tasks that define the stages of the creation and publishing lifecycle. Typically, tasks include authoring, approval, and deployment. Tasks can be completed by different users. For example, the approval task could be completed by a supervisor, and the deployment task could be performed by a Web site administrator.
Often, a project represents a logical grouping of items related to a particular business goal. For example, you could have a project called Back to School that contains all the items you need to create a microsite that highlights back-to-school products and promotions. Any number of items can be managed and deployed by a single project.
An Emergency project is a special kind of project that allows you to update a production or staging site within a few minutes. Emergency projects bypass the standard deployment steps, and use an emergency workflow that has only two steps. It is important to note that this project should be used with caution.
Asset: In ATG Content Administration, any item that you create, edit, and deploy is referred to as an asset. Merchandising assets include catalogs, products, SKUs, promotions, and price lists. To learn how to work with commerce assets, see Creating and Managing Assets.
Versioning: As well as managing the creation and deployment of assets, ATG Content Administration performs a type of source control, called versioning, on each asset. When you create an asset, the system gives it the number 1. When you or another user edits the asset, a second version is created, and versions 1 and 2 are both stored in the system. This behavior has two purposes: it prevents conflicts when two or more people edit the same asset, and it allows you to recover from errors by reverting to a previous version of an asset at any time. See Resolving Conflicts with Other Projects for more information.
For detailed information on any of these terms, or for more information about versioning and deployment, refer to the Content Administration Guide for Business Users.
