Reasons Why Bulk Publishing Is Needed
- Auto and manual cache clear processes do not work consistently or reliably in AVEVA's implementation
- Tag changes require all affected pages to be republished; sometimes there can be hundreds or thousands of pages impacted across all languages
- Some code changes (x-default, etc.) requiring republishing of pages to push changes to the live site
Two Methods for Bulk Publishing
- Manual: Go site section by site section - manually check pages to be republished, then click "Manage Publish"
- Automated: Go through the AEM interface to bulk publish
- Need to find instructions from vendor on how to do this
- Confirm with vendor: Will language-masters pages be rolled out to live copy automatically and republished, or will only live copy pages be republished? We absolutely cannot risk any language-masters pages rolling out - only Live Copy pages may be republished to reduce risk
Recommendations
Do the following before bulk publishing, regardless of the method used:
- Verify no content is queued in Live Copy, but not approved to be launched yet (e.g., press release timed for a later launch date)
- Pause Coveo indexing
- Delete as many ARCHIVE pages as possible to reduce risk of these pages being publishing and geting back into external and internal search
- Address any tag updates needed
- Address any experience fragment updates needed
Workaround for ARCHIVE Pages
Consider if any time will be saved with steps below vs. selecting specific pages to bulk publish:
- Allow all pages to be published
- Do a search in AEM Sites for "ARCHIVE"
- Manually unpublish all pages with "ARCHIVE" and a Not Published Date to ensure they remain out of external and internal search (this happens if a page is republished, and "No Index" and "Hide from Coveo" are not selected)
Note: Other naming conventions to search for and manually unpublish after a Bulk Publish is run: CH, DEAD, HOLD, REPRESENTATIVE, REDIRECT.
Limitations
If tag changes were made before bulk publishing, they may break Card Carousels on pages. Republishing the page will not fix a broken Card Carousel. The Card Carousel will need to be edited by a publisher to address its unique issues, and then the page will need to be republished again.
Run an ACS Commons report to find the impacted tags associated to Card Carousels, and then audit the pages and take the necessary actions. (Make sure the Stage environment has a recent copy from Prod for the most accurate report data.)
Pros
- Provides a workaround solution to the ongoing cache issue that has yet to be resolved
- Will allow a manual solution to address caching issues with XFs
- Will allow a manual solution to address the requirement for republishing pages due to tag changes
- When tags are moved or edited, pages have to republished in order for the tags changes to be reflected on the front end in Coveo facets
- This bulk publish workaround will allow publishers to just republish all pages without building tedious inventories of affected pages, which is only possible to generate on Stage with ACS Commons reports (a copy down from Prod to Stage is required in order for the latest data to be reflected in the ACS Commons reports)
Cons
- Manual activity, so AVEVA resources are required to action (If caching just worked as it is supposed to, then this process would happen automatically)
- Introduces risks
- May publish previously unpublished pages that have not been accurately marked as ARCHIVE
- Oncrawl report for sitemap orphans will help to flag these pages
- May publish pages that should be "No Index" or "Hide from Coveo", but have not been handled correctly in the backend
- May publish previously unpublished pages that have not been accurately marked as ARCHIVE
- Time consuming
- Tedious QA/UAT to ensure no pages were accidentally published
- Some site sections may be too large to manually bulk publish in one go (generates a 414 error) and will require smaller groupings of pages to be bulk published
- May not address caching issues within the page body content (may address only XF caching issues and republishing needed due to tag changes)