10.3 Website operations

10.3.1 General

10.3.2 Publish

10.3.3 Un-publish

10.3.4 Web Preview

10.3.5 Standard operations on websites

10.3.1 General

Websites offer three new operations to the user - Publish, Un-publish and Web Preview. The standard Business Collaborator operations (Cut, Copy, Delete etc.) all work in the same way within websites as they do in normal workspaces/folders in terms of the Business Collaborator view. However, they also have additional behaviour to ensure that they have the correct effect on the equivalent files on the live (published) website - see section 10.3.5.

10.3.2 Publish

Publishing files copies them to the live server, making them available as a website. To publish a site (or part of a site), select the relevant website/web folders/files, and click  Selected  |  Publish  . Note that documents do NOT need to be unpublished before they are republished - the new version will simply overwrite the old one.

Once a document is published, any previously published version will NOT be available. (If the document has been stored under version control within Business Collaborator, it will of course be possible to return to a previous version and publish this in its place). Note that the default.html file in the root level of the web site is created automatically at the same time as the web site and is automatically published.

Published documents have a event icon associated with them in the file view. If a document is changed after publishing (e.g. edited), this icon changes to a icon, indicating that the document is published, but that it is a different version of the file to the one within Business Collaborator.

Figure 10.3-1: Website publishing Events

If any problems occur when a web site or a selection of files are published, such as invalid filenames, a Website publishing Report is shown, giving details (see Figure 10.3-2). It is clearly indicated whether files have been published or not.

Figure 10.3-2: Website publishing Report

10.3.3 Un-publish

Un-publishing files removes them from the live server. To un-publish a site (or part of a site), select the relevant website/web folders/files, and click  Selected  |  Unpublish  . Un-published documents have a event icon associated with them in the file view (unless they are "raw" documents which have never been published, in which case they have no associated icon). See map.gif in Figure 10.3-1 for an example of an un-published file.

10.3.4 Web Preview

Individual documents which are ready for web publication can be reviewed by clicking  |  Web Preview  in the folder view (see Figure 10.3-1). The Web Preview process 'corrects' web links to other documents on the website, replacing links to files on the live server with links to the associated document stored within Business Collaborator. This allows a complete website to be previewed before it is published.

If the website has a document with the name "index.htm(l)", "welcome.htm(l)", "home.htm(l)" or "default.htm(l)" in the root folder, you can also access this from the Web Preview action on the website object itself.

10.3.5 Standard operations on websites

It is assumed that the user has a general understanding of how the standard Business Collaborator operations (Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete, Undelete, Destroy, Rename) work (see section 3.6). This section simply explains how their actions are extended for websites.

The major point to remember is that any action that removes a website or any of its contents from the Business Collaborator file view (Cut, Delete, Rename) will automatically un-publish it from the live server. Pasting or Undeleting items in the Bag or Waste will not re-publish them. All automatic un-publishing actions in the above operations are recorded by Event notification.

Copying a web site/folder/document creates a new (unpublished) version of it in the Bag, with 'Copy of' prefixed to its original name. This prevents two website items with the same Publish URL being created. The original item is left unchanged.

Destroying a site completely removes it from the server; it is not accessible again unless you have archived it elsewhere.