Answered Staging with 2 MODx Revo installs or a comprehensive drafting solution

Hey!

I am working on a project where the content on our pages will be changing a lot over time. We are looking for a solution where we can make a ton of changes, review those changes, then publish all of these changes at once.

We have come up with a couple different ways that would work but I can't seem to find a solution for modx.

We can have two separate MODx installs where one is the staging server (staging.ourdomain.com) and then the live server (ourdomain.com).

Lots of people on our team would have access to the staging server but only a few people would have the rights to publish. This would be the best way for us to set it up.

We would also be fine with a drafting solution, kinda with versionx, but have unpublished "versions" that we could then publish at once. (we are already using versionx)

If anyone has an idea of how this could be accomplished that information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

There's no reason why you should have 2 installs I would just have 2 contexts, make the draft on the staging context one and when it's approved move it to the production site.

Use ContextRouter to handle you contexts and just duplicate the main site and use that as your staging environment.

Quote from: benmarte at Mar 05, 2013, 07:32 PM

There's no reason why you should have 2 installs I would just have 2 contexts, make the draft on the staging context one and when it's approved move it to the production site.

There IS an reason why you do it. We have just launched an new Website, with currently about 3000 Pages inside. On the next months there will be about 8000.
With hunders clicks per Minute on the main time, clearing the cache results here always heavy loading times.

Also we are looking forward for some lokal Servers around the world, like in China. And with that, we will create an replication system with just one manager.

Thanks for the replies. benmarte that actually might work for our level of site, even though it definitely will not work for Michael's. We have about 25 pages that will be updated, but that list might grow.

I am more interested in BobRay's solution though with StageCoach, it seems to be a little bit more what we are after. I am excited to spend more with both options and see which one will work the best.

Bear in mind that with the current version of Stagecoach, all the staged resources go in the same folder. There's no organization, so if you were staging lots of resources, it might get difficult to find the one you want to work on (though StageCoach won't mind if you move them around after they're staged, since the ID won't change).

CacheMaster might also be useful since it keeps the entire cache from being refreshed when you modify a resource.

BobRay,

StageCoach is going to work beautifully for what we are doing! The implementation is going to work well with the security we need on live pages too. This will simplify the process a ton for us. The one note you had I can see what you are talking about and believe it or not that is fine. When I staged a top level resource, it pulled all of its children into the stage too (not sure if bug or feature, but feature for me!!). Example:

Parent Resource <- Staged this file (not a container)
|- Child Resource <- Also staged, inside of the parent resource
|- Child Resource <- Also staged, inside of the parent resource
|- Child Resource <- Also staged, inside of the parent resource

I did have one question though. How do I change the date and time of a staged resource, like if we wanted to push up the publish date for the changes?

I'm not sure how the children got staged. That's a surprise to me.

I'm still working on the next release and I can't remember if this is in your version, but the stagecoach_update_publishedon_date System Setting will control whether the publish date gets updated.

BTW, I'm having trouble getting the cache cleared for the first visitor after the update takes place. It's working if you have stagecoach_archive_original set, so try that if you're having trouble.