Review and Publish Your Site

You can review your unpublished changes before you publish the content to your site. Choose what content you want to publish and when to publish it. You can publish content immediately, on a specific date and time, or set a date range that you want the content to be visible on your site.

Review Changes

You should review any unpublished changes before you publish them. The Review & Publish Changes Mode enables you to see the Unpublished Changes list. You can select any or all of the unpublished changes to publish.

For each change you see:

Type of content
Type of change, for example, add or modify
Page to which the change applies
Visibility start and end dates
The name of the user who made the change
Date and time of the change

To preview the detail of the change, point to the item on the list, and click Preview.

An example of the unpublished changes page.

To review changes:

Click Review & Publish Changes Mode on the Site Management toolbar. This displays the Unpublished Changes List.
Point to the item and click Preview to preview the unpublished changes.
Click Edit to view the change in Edit Mode and make any changes.
Click Close above the page preview to close the detail preview.

Publish Content

Publish content so it is visible to site visitors. You publish content from the Unpublished Changes list. You can select multiple pieces of content on the list and publish it immediately. After you publish content, it is displayed at the date and time specified by the content visibility start date and time.

To publish content:

Log in to Site Management Tools.
Click Publish on the Site Management toolbar to display the Unpublished Changes list.
Select the pieces of content you want to publish and click Publish.
Click OK to publish the selected content. Click Cancel to cancel the operation.

Remove Published Content

When you set the visibility end date and time on a piece of content, that content stops displaying at the specified date and time. Content whose end date and time have passed is referred to as expired content.

If you have content that does not have an end date and time and you want it to expire, you can set the visibility end date and time to the current date and time. Alternatively, you can expire content by going to the page with that content and clicking X. This sets the expiration date and time to now.

If the content has a future start date and time, expiring the content sets the end date and time to the current View Site as Of time. Go to the Unpublished Changes list and publish the change to remove it from the site.

Cache Clearing for SMT Content

When you publish content, certain SMT related caches are cleared. See Clearing Cached Site Management Tools Content.

Preview Your Site

This information refers to SuiteCommerce or the 2018.2 release of SuiteCommerce Advanced or later.

Because content may be visible only during a specified time frame, you have the option to view the site as a visitor sees it on any given date and time. The View Site As Of date picker on the SMT toolbar lets you choose a date and time and preview how the site displays at that time.

Include Unpublished Changes in Site Preview

When you add new content or make changes to existing content, the addition or change is always placed in an unpublished state. This prevents the content from ever displaying, even after you reach the visibility start date and time.

When previewing the site, you have the option to include or exclude any unpublished changes in the preview. You do this by clicking Include Unpublished Changes on the SMT toolbar.

This option is selected by default so that unpublished changes are displayed on the site. You can clear this option to exclude unpublished changes from the preview.

When previewing the site, you can quickly spot unpublished changes in Edit Mode by looking for the unpublished icon, denoted by a blue circle, in the upper left corner of the content.

You can also see unpublished changes on the Unpublished Changes list.

Content Expires Before Publishing

You may encounter a situation when you have unpublished content that expires. Content expiration occurs when the visibility end date and time for the content is passed.

Consider this example, you create a new piece of text content for the home page. When you create the content, you specify the visibility start and end dates and times, but you leave the content in an unpublished state because you are still revising the text. However, you become involved with another project and need to set the new text content aside for a couple of weeks. During that time, the visibility end date and time are passed, so the content expires before it was published.

When this happens, the content is displayed in the unpublished changes list, but it is flagged as expired. You have two options for dealing with this content.

Go to the Unpublished Changes list and publish the expired content. It does not display on the site because it is expired. When you publish the expired content a CMS content record is created in NetSuite. You can edit the CMS content record to change the visibility dates if necessary to make the content available.
Go to the Unpublished Changes list and discard the expired content. This removes the content.

Discard Content Vs Expiring Content

If you have unpublished content and you decide to remove it rather than publish it, you have two options:

Discard the Content
Expire the Content

Discarding content is the preferred method of removing unpublished content that you do not want. For example, you may have started creating text content, but then decide you do not need it so you want to discard it. Review the following workflow for discarding content:

Go to the Unpublished Changes list.
Select the unwanted content in the list.
Click Discard.

When viewing the content on the page you can click X. This method expires the content by setting the visibility end date and time to the current date and time.

When you use this method for published content, it immediately stops displaying on the site after you publish the change.
When you use this method to remove unpublished content, the visibility end date and time are set to the current date and time to prevent it from displaying on the site. It is still displayed in the Unpublished Changes list. To remove it from the list you can publish it or you can select it and then discard it.

Visibility Timeline

The Visibility Timeline gives you a one-stop location for viewing upcoming published content and landing page changes. You can use this timeline to see what changes go live today, tomorrow, next week, next month, or even next year. The timeline lists the following information for each piece of content:

Type of content
Page
Event
Start date and time
End date and time, if it exists

The events reported in the timeline include:

New content to display
Content that is going to expire

You can also preview the content or go to the Edit Mode from the Visibility Timeline list.