Stage Your Customer Portal Pages

After you have edited the customer portal pages in the development area, you can stage them to see how your changes will appear on the production site.

Before you start

Before you can stage development pages, the profile assigned to you must have the CP Stage permission enabled. You or your administrator can enable this permission if necessary.

Because the staging area replicates the production site but keeps the pages from being visible to customers, you can continue to modify the development pages and then stage them without exposing the changes to your customers until you are satisfied with the results.

Here's what to do

1. Log in to B2C Service.

   Alternately, you can use the Customer Portal Administration site instead of the administration interface by entering https://your_site/ci/deploy/index (or http://your_site/ci/deploy/index if your site does not have SSL enabled.)

   Continue to Step 5 to resume this procedure.

2. Click Configuration on the navigation pane.
3. Expand Site Configuration and double-click Customer Portal.
4. Select the interface you want to stage from the Interfaces column.
5. Perform one of these tasks:

   • On the administration interface, click Stage on the Customer Portal editor ribbon.

   • On the Customer Portal Administration site, click Stage on the Deploy page.

   If you have created a new widget for your customer portal, you must be sure that Copy to Staging is selected for the widget on this first step of the staging process. Additionally, you must also select Yes to push all framework and widget version changes on the Version Changes page during the staging process. If you do not include pushing the version changes, your new widget will not be available on your staging site.

   The first window displays a list of files that have been changed in the development area since the last time files were staged. By default, all new and edited files are selected to be copied to the staging area, and any files you have removed from the development pages have the Remove From Staging action.

6. To prevent a file from being copied to the staging environment, click the Action drop-down list in the row associated with the file and select No Action.

   This lets you maintain any changes you have made to the development page without having those changes appear in the staging environment or the production pages when you promote the site.

7. To remove one or more files from the staging environment, click the Action drop-down list in the row associated with the file and select Remove From Staging.
   The selected file will be removed from the staged pages and will not be available to be copied to your production site.
8. Click Next to continue.

   The window displays any version changes to the framework or widgets.

9. To push all framework and widget version changes, including the addition of new widgets, select Yes from the drop-down list located in the bottom-left corner of the page. If you do not include pushing the version changes, any new widgets will not be available on your staging site.
10. Click Next to continue.

    The window displays all user agent page set mappings for the interface and notes whether they are enabled or disabled. It also shows the differences in the page sets between the development and staging areas. By default, No Action is selected for the listed page sets, but if you have disabled a page set, the action will be Remove From Staging.

11. To copy a page set that you’ve enabled to the staging area, click the drop-down list in the Actions column and select Copy To Staging.
12. To remove a development page set from the staging area, click the drop-down list in the Actions column and select Remove From Staging.
13. Click Next.

    The window summarizes your selections from the earlier pages of the staging process.

14. To store a comment in the staging log file, enter a note in the field.
    You can enter up to 4,000 characters.
15. To re-initialize the staging environment, select the check box just above the Stage button.
    Caution: If you select this check box, you will lose any file and page set selections you have made during the staging process. Re-initializing means that all files in the staging area will be deleted and replaced with their corresponding files or settings from the development area.
16. Click Stage.

    A message asks you to confirm that you want to copy the selected items to the staging area.

    Note: You will see a message if a deploy lock is in place. Clicking No cancels the staging operation and Yes overrides the existing lock and then continues with the staging operation. Use caution when clicking Yes because you may compromise another staff member’s file promote if you start overwriting files in the staging area.
17. Click Stage to continue.

    When the process is complete, a window lets you know staging was successful. It also displays a link to view the log. If you staged the files from the Customer Portal Administration site, the window also contains links to the staging area, where you can view the pages, and a link to the Promote page.

    If any widgets have been deleted, the message notifies you that the deleted widget has been deactivated in the staging environment. Also, if any of the widget versions are incompatible with the framework, a staging error occurs and identifies the incompatible widget.