Blogs

I wanted to explore the staging feature in LR.
I could not find much info available on the web on how to do this. May be I missed some thing
One of my colleuges (Prakash KLV) explained this feature to me.
So I thought, let me document this, so that it would be useful for others too.

What is Staging ?
Assume that you have a live community, with many people accessing it.
Your community has become very popular, and you wanted to add some new portlets, modify some portlets, change the theme and so on..
You wouldnt want to start making changes to the live community, right ?.
You would like to make the changes in some other place (other than the live page), keep previewing them, and if you are satisfied, you would like to apply those changes to the live page. Wont that be great ?
Thats excatly the option that the staging feature provides.

Now let me show an example of how this could be done. For this blog, I show how staging could be done for a community.

The same steps could be followed for staging in an organization as well.

Step 1:
Create new "Open" community called Staging Community.

Step 2:
Create public pages for this community and add some portlets to it.
My Communities Portlet -> For Staging Community -> Click on Actions Button -> Manage Pages-> Create public pages
Add some portlets to it. I have added Calendar and Rss Feed Portlet.
Observe the text for the portlet titles and notice that the classic theme with blue colour scheme is applied.
 

Step 3:
Now lets activate staging feature for that community.
My Communities Portlet -> For Staging Community -> Click on Actions Button -> Manage Pages -> Settings -> Click on Activate Staging check box.
 

Step 4:
Now navigate to the public page of the staging community.
Click on the dock.
You would see that there is a new Staging Menu Option.
Hover over the Staging Menu, and you would see the View Staged page Option.
Click on that.

Step 5:
You would now see the staging page. Observe that it has a red border.
I have minimised the portlets so that you could see the red border in the screenshot.

Step 6:
Now lets add a new portlet (say blogs) to this staged page.
I also change the portlet titles of the Calendar and RSS Feed Portlet.
I have also changed the theme. Have applied classic theme with green colour scheme.

Step 7:
Now look at the live community page.
Observe that the public page still not changed.
Your community members would still be looking at this page only.

Step 8:
Now lets publish our staged community so that it becomes live.
Navigate to the public page of the staging community (through the dock).
Click on the dock.
Hover over the Staging menu, and click on Publish to Live.
 

Step 9:
You would get the "Publish to Live" pop up page, select the pages that you want to publish, and click on publish.

Step 10:
Now navigate to the Staging-Community public page, and you would see that the changes have been reflected..
You would see that on the live page, the portlet titles have changed, the new theme is applied, the new portlet is visible.
The users would now view the "new" public page !
 

Publishing to a Remote LR Instance:

You could also publish the staged community, to a remote Liferay Instance.
For the Staging Community, Click on Actions -> Manage pages -> Publish To Remote.
In the "Publish To Remote" pop up, enter the IP, Port, and Group Id of the remote Liferay Instance.
It is also possible to schedule this publishing. Click on the "Scheduler" for configuring this.

Pls leave your comments for this page.
Happy Staging !!!