Publishing Content
Now that the site and page have been created, you can publish it out and see the resulting file. Publishing takes place from a combination of the template, configuration set, destination, and transport; and it allows for simultaneously publishing content to multiple servers.
A. Create a Transport
The first task you need to do is set up a publishing transport. Transports are the mechanisms that move content from a temporary directory on the server to the final location. Transports can push content out via FTP/SFTP; through a type of file system like a VPN, mapped network drive, shared drive, or mounted drive; or to a relational database.
To create a transport:
- Click on Administration in the top navigation menu.
- Click on Transports in the left navigation bar.
- Click New Transport.
- For Transport Type, select the Filesystem radio button and then click Submit.
- For the Transport Name, type in Server Output.
- For the Server Directory, type in c:\temp\cascadepub if you are on a Windows server or /tmp/cascade-publishing if you are on a UNIX/Linux or Mac OS X server.
- Now click the Submit button to save the new transport.
B. Create a Destination
With the transport in place, you need to set up a publishing destination for the Site's content to be written out as a file. Destinations allow the use of the same transport across multiple sites. Destinations allow the transport to be maintained in a shared location, where it may have more restrictive permissions that allow protection of the FTP/SFTP or database login information.
To create a Destination:
- Click on Administration in the top navigation menu.
- Click on Destinations in the left navigation bar.
- Click New Destination.
- While under the General pane, set the Name value to Local Server.
- The Directory field can be left blank because it will inherit this value from the transport. If you specify a relative path here, it will be appended to the Transport's path. Optionally, if you want to overwrite the Directory, you can use an absolute path here and have the content directed to a different folder than specified by the Transport.
- Select a Transport by clicking the browse icon, navigating to Server Output, and then clicking Confirm in the pop up window.
- Now for Activation, ensure the box for Enable destination is checked. This checkbox must be checked for the destination to work. It is supplied so that you can have destinations that are created but are turned on or off for administrative reasons.
- Finally, click Submit to save the new destination.
The destination and the transport are now attached to all pages on this site.
C. Publish a Page
With everything in order, publish the example page. To publish a page:
- Click on Home in the top navigation menu in order to load the asset interface.
- Navigate to your example page by clicking on the page example.
- Now, with the page example loaded, click on the Publish tab.
- Click Submit to publish the page. You should see a green message bar saying, "Publish message sent successfully.”
- If you are able to check the local hard drive of the server (not your personal computer), you will see the published example.htm file in the c:\temp\cascadepub folder.
Content may be published from five different items in the system: at the page, file, folder, destination, publish set, and site. Content can be published out as different scripting languages like ASP, ASPX, PHP, CFM, and SHTML.
Pushing out the content as “baked” files provides several benefits, including:
- Production websites are completely independent of the CMS.
- When the CMS is upgraded, the websites continue to run.
- Deployment of content to multiple servers with built-in publishing framework is made easier.
- Web servers support more hits and visitors with baked content.
Additionally, content can be published to external databases and other applications using standard scripting languages.