We’re updating our CMS publishing model to improve the efficiency and speed of the publishing process. Our current schedule publishes the whole site five times over 24 hours. We’re moving to publishing the whole website once per day, at midnight, and frequently updated, time-sensitive or on-demand urgent changes hourly. This change will ensure a more reliable experience for all users.
Background
Currently, the Web CMS publishes on a schedule, five times a day: 10am, 1.30pm, 5pm, 8.30pm and midnight. Publishes have become increasingly slow as the website has grown and we have added more advanced functionality. Because of this, there can be a very long wait in between content being added to the CMS and it being made live, especially if you’ve just missed one publish and have to wait for the next one. There can be an even longer wait when there’s an occasional technical issue with the publish that means one gets skipped.
The Digital team often have to make emergency edits on the live site when changes need to go live sooner than the schedule allows, which is a time-consuming and risky technical task. This also takes us away from other work to improve the CMS and the website as a whole.
A new publish schedule
To address these challenges, we are planning to move to a new model where we publish most parts of the site in the midnight publish only, with the exception of a few key branches that will be included in the daytime publishes. By reducing the amount of content published each time, the publish will take much less time to complete, and we’ll be able to run hourly publishes throughout the day.
What this means for you
For most users, this means that general updates will go live overnight after you save and approve your changes. We know that there are rare cases where changes will crop up that really can’t wait that long, so we’re working on a specific process to handle these requests. Because of the hourly publishes, this will be much more efficient than the current emergency publish system.
This new approach offers several key advantages:
- The new model provides a simpler, more predictable system for knowing when your changes will go live.
- Because the only full publish will be out of office hours, there’s no need to worry that something you’re working on will accidentally go live unfinished.
- Our central news and events feed, staff news and student news will move to an hourly publish schedule. This will make it much easier to publish news quickly following announcement embargoes being lifted.
- By making the system more efficient, we reduce the reliance on the Digital team to manually carry out emergency updates.
Timeline
We plan to implement these changes in July. We’ll be in touch with CMS users once we have a confirmed date.
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