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How dotCMS Hybrid CMS Streamlines Global Publishing at Scale

Jason Smith

As enterprises continue to invest in content marketing, they are starting to come across complex requirements for publishing content worldwide. Without the right publishing infrastructure in place, organizations are wasting marketing resources and limiting their content velocity potential. And with 60% of people saying it’s hard to produce content consistently, it’s best not to add content publishing difficulties to the mix. 

The Challenges of Global Publishing

Most enterprises need to publish content across many regions around the world. That means they have a globally distributed network of servers that they need to publish content to. This presents a challenge for keeping content in sync across authoring and production environments. Companies need a seamless, distributed publishing infrastructure for reliability and consistency.

Along with complex distribution is the challenge of scaling sites with the sheer volume of content enterprises are generating. Some aspects of a website require complex dynamic functionality, while others are just static pages. For optimal scalability, companies need the flexibility to publish their websites with performance in mind.

Publishing With dotCMS

In recognizing that most enterprises have vastly different publishing requirements, dotCMS provides a highly flexible publishing infrastructure to fit the specific needs of each organization. Let’s take a closer look at push publishing, the differences between static and dynamic endpoints, bundles, the publishing queue, and the integrity checker.

Push Publishing

With the innovative push publishing feature, marketing teams can easily publish content to many dotCMS instances across a multitude of servers and geographical locations. You can even push publish to a cluster of servers. Push publishing, therefore, is the key to globally distributed content publishing.

There are two methods for push publishing — static and dynamic — and each has different use cases based on business requirements. Oftentimes, companies utilize a combination of both across their publishing environments.

Static Endpoints

Websites managed by dotCMS can have multiple static endpoints set up across many geographic regions and languages. When pushing content to static endpoints (i.e. Static AWS S3), only static content like HTML, CSS, and images are delivered. That means greatly reduced computing resources, administration, maintenance, and in turn, expenses.

Static publishing offers organizations a multitude of benefits. With static endpoints, there’s a reduced attack surface and improved security. They’re also often used to store a backup of the site for regulatory or legal compliance purposes.

Static endpoints also have much better performance. Sometimes companies optimize performance even more by using the AWS S3 bucket as a content delivery network (CDN) to caching the site globally. In many cases, enterprises will use static endpoints for most of their sites, but utilize callbacks to dynamic endpoints for more advanced services like forms or site search.

Dynamic Endpoints

Dynamic endpoints deliver content “on the fly” based on many factors, which differs greatly from static endpoints that serve the same content during each visit. That’s because these endpoints are backed by a fully-functioning dotCMS instance.

Whenever companies need advanced functionality like personalization, widgets, or other custom behaviors, they should utilize dynamic endpoints. These endpoints do require more resources to run the dotCMS instance and additional dynamic processing when serving content.

While dynamic content can be pushed to static endpoints, much of it is either converted to static content automatically or not delivered to the static endpoint. Dynamic content within dotCMS includes tags, categories, rules, personas, workflow schemas, and OSGI plugins. These are the building blocks for personalization, workflows, and other advanced dotCMS capabilities.

Bundles

When it comes to publishing, marketers can push individual objects or multiple at one time using various methods. It’s possible to manually select many objects at once, but usually more efficient to combine content into bundles. Bundles are groups of objects such as content, hosts, folders, plugins, users, content types, and more. Marketers can modify and push publish content more efficiently by leveraging bundles.

Publishing Queue

You can view content or bundles jobs that are set for push publishing within the publishing queue. If the content still has a pending status, you can delete it from the queue before it gets pushed to the results. There’s also a full listing of historical publishing jobs as well. If you want to get a history of the content itself or roll back to previous content versions, you can navigate to the TimeMachine feature.

Further Reading: Exploring TimeMachine: How dotCMS Handles Content Versioning

Integrity Checker

In order to ensure content objects are in sync across environments, dotCMS has built an integrity checker. This feature resolves out of sync objects before push publishing to dynamic endpoints. Publishing conflicts can occur if users create objects with the same name on both sending and receiving servers, so it’s essential that companies follow push publishing best practices by limiting content creation permission to a single authoring environment. With the integrity checker, however, users can quickly find and resolve conflicts if they do occur.

dotCMS Streamlines Publishing

Publishing content to a variety of channels and geographical locations doesn’t need to be difficult. dotCMS provides a flexible infrastructure that enables organizations to efficiently schedule and publish content to reach global audiences without compromising performance or security. 

dotCMS is built from the ground up for enterprise-grade hybrid content delivery to distributed environments with its innovative push publishing infrastructure. Companies have the flexibility to choose static or dynamic endpoints, for example, depending on business requirements. They can also seamlessly integrate push publishing with the workflows module so that non-technical users can easily publish content to dotCMS instances worldwide. Other features like bundles, the publishing queue, and integrity checker bring additional efficiency to marketing teams. 

dotCMS, therefore, is ideal for globally distributed publishing at scale — for both marketers and IT operations. You can learn more about worldwide enterprise content delivery our whitepaper: Global Content Orchestration: How dotCMS Facilitates International Growth.

Jason Smith
Chief User Experience Officer
November 19, 2019

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