Improving reliability of CMS publish

We've recently made a few changes to the way the Web CMS publishes updates to the website.

Publish speed

A few months ago we upgraded to a new release of Site Manager and were able to change how we output files as part of the publish. This change meant we shaved about 30 minutes off the publish duration and a full publish cycle now takes around 90 minutes. We hope to make further improvements later this year.

Publish reliability

Regular website contributors will know that occasionally the publish will fail and updates won't go live as part of the normal schedule. Last week we made a change which should significantly reduce the frequency of this happening. Changes should go live on schedule more consistently as a result.

Deletions and failed publishes

The most likely cause of a publish failure now is a deliberate failsafe built into our process which is worth a reminder.

If we detect a large number of deletions from the website as part of a publish, we don't publish any changes from that publish cycle until we've had chance to check whether something has gone wrong. One of the most common accidental causes of large numbers of deletions is renaming an output URI or Media Library category; this changes the URI of all pages or files in that branch of the site and thus deletes all the old ones.

If you're deliberately deleting a large number of pages or files (ie. 100+), it's always worth letting us know in advance and we can work around the automated failsafe.

Checking when publish last happened

If you're wondering why a change you made hasn't gone live, you can check when the most recent successful publish completed on the main Site Manager dashboard.

If you're sure your change should be live and yet you are still seeing an old version, make sure your browser is loading the latest copy by bypassing the cache. If it still doesn't show up, give us a shout and we'll help figure out what's happened.