Publishing Operations

High Score Labs News   •   May 2, 2016

Sitecore allows content authors and marketing teams to easily deliver new content and better engage an audience in real time. One mechanism that makes that possible is the publish feature. This works by moving content that is crafted internally and make it available to the public. The operation is pretty straight forward and is designed to be managed by non technical teams. Below is a brief introduction in the basics of the publish operation.

  1. Log into Sitecore
    1. The system should default you to your preferred interface
    2. Publish Item: This will only publish the parent item that you have currently selected in the content tree and its children (if told to do so)

      • Smart Publish: This will compare items from source to target (authoring to public) and publish what has changed. This method tends to work more consistently and reliability. This should be the default method used
      • Republish: Unlike the similar option mentioned for publish site, this will still re publish everything but only what you have currently selected in the content tree. This can still be demanding of the system depending on how much is being published, i.e., a parent with only three children versus all the items under /sitecore node
      • Publish Sub Items: This check box will allow you to publish the selected item and its children (optional)
      • Publish Related Items: This option will ensure that when publishing all related items (items that are used by the item being published) are pushed live (optional)
  2. In the content editor, navigate to publish > publishing section in the ribbon
  4. When publishing there are a few different ways:
    1. Publish Site: This will pretty much publish all of sitecore if used. When selecting this you will see this pop up and your options are defined as:
      • Incremental Publish: This will only publish items that sitecore knows have changed (it keeps up in the database). Although this is the faster way to publish, there are times when not everything changed will go out
      • Smart Publish: This will compare items from source to target (authoring to public) and publish what has changed. This method tends to work more consistently and reliability. This should be the default method used
      • Republish: This will go and republish everything from authoring to the live site (production, public, etc). This is the slowest most resource intensive method available. It should only be used as a last resort
  5. Make your selection, method of publish and start the publish operation
  6. NOTE: if the publish didn’t publish everything, here is a list of things to check that are common issues:
    1. Is the item in a workflow
    2. Is the item a child of an item that is in the workflow
    3. Does the item exist when checking the published database using the sitecore interface (a Sitecore admin may need to help with this)
    4. Is the item locked by a content author
    5. Has cache cleared on the published site
    6. Has the index finished rebuilding