Site Groups

[sbwalker]

One of the items which has been on the roadmap for quite a while is the ability to leverage the multi-tenant capabilities of the framework to provide some additional content management capabilities. In order to deliver these capabilities, the main requirement was the ability to group sites together and provide some configuration options at the group level. This feature has now been added for the upcoming Oqtane 10.1 release, resulting in a couple of major new enhancements:

Content Staging

The concept behind content staging is that you can have a pair of sites in your installation - a Primary (staging site) and a Secondary (production site). You perform all of your content management activities on the Primary (ie. adding/modifying/deleting pages, modules, content, files, etc...) and once the site has been fully reviewed and approved, you synchronize it with the Secondary - which essentially replicates all of the content and configuration. This synchronization process is not a one-time event... it is expected to occur continuously throughout the lifetime of a site.

Content Localization

The concept behind content localization is that you can have multiple sites in your installation which are affiliated with one another, however each site manages content in its own language. Often in this scenario, one of the sites is considered to be the Primary and the other sites are replicas with the content translated into a different language. Synchronization is still necessary in this scenario, however you do not want the content from the Primary site to overwrite the translated content on the other sites - instead, you simply want to notify the owners of the other sites when content changes on the Primary site (so they can make the changes).

I will demonstrate early previews of both of these capabilities at the Oqtane Community Standup next week.

[sbwalker]

The final implementation of Site Groups is significantly different than the early preview provided at the last Oqtane Community Standup. You can still manage your Site Groups from within Site Settings:

Each Site Group has a Type which defines its behavior:

Synchronization - used for synchronizing content from a primary site to other sites in the group
Change Detection - used to notify a site administrator when content has changed on a primary site
Localization - used for grouping sites which offer content in different languages

Once a Site Group is created you can add Members:

There can be an unlimited number of members, but only 1 primary member. Note that member sites must be in the same tenant (database).

When interacting with a site which is a primary member in a Sychronization or Change Detection group, an additional option will be visible in the Control Panel:

The Synchronize button allows you to initiate the Sychronization or Change Detection process.