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We have three options when queueing items for publishing.

  • Publish Content Now
  • Publish Content Later
  • Schedule Publish Phases Separately

If choosing the third option we can choose generate publishable content now or later as part of "phase 1."

Phase 1: Generate Publishable Content

  • Generate Publishable Content Now
  • Generate Publishable Content Later

We can independently choose to place content online after this first phase or later.

Phase 2: Place Content Online

  • Place Content Online Immediately After Phase 1
  • Place Content Online Later

Questions

  1. Does the first phase "simply" render the content as it exists at that time in the CM? Does it do anything else aside from running template and resolving related items to publish?

  2. What's the difference between choosing Generate Publishable Content Now with Place Content Online Immediately After Phase 1 versus the basic Publish Content Now? Do these accomplish the same behavior?

I can definitely see a case for generating the publishable content now and placing it online later. I'm hesitant about generating later (because you'd have to trust changes get made in time). But when would you recommend generating now and placing immediately (which sounds like publish now)?

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When you separate publishing into two phases, Tridion will do the following:

Phase 1

  1. Resolve the item you publish
  2. Render the content for each resolved item
  3. Package the rendering output
  4. Transport it over to the Content Delivery side

The only thing it doesn't do at this stage is actually deploy the content. That happens at the time that you specify for phase 2.

Phase 2

In the second phase, Tridion simply deploys the content that it transported over in phase 1. Since the Publisher is still in control of this "deploy" action, it will actively send a "mini transport package" that contains just a "commit" instruction.

Note: this description is based on my knowledge of the process before Tridion 2011. In Tridion 2011 the deployment was majorly modified, but I don't think this process was changed.

Answers

  1. I think this answers your first question: in addition to resolving and rendering, Tridion also transports the content over to the Content Delivery side.

  2. It used to be different indeed: a "publish now" would (pre Tridion 2011) result in a single "transport and deploy" action, so a single zip file. A "publish now and then deploy now" would result in two transport actions/packages: one with the actual content and one with the "deploy now/commit" instruction. But I'm not sure what the difference is since Tridion 2011.

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  • Interesting and accepted. The "now" with "immediately" option doesn't seem to be a typical choice; but I see how we might choose it for maybe performance (could the deploy instruction really be that big, though?) or when investigating transport and deployment issues separately.
    – Alvin Reyes
    Commented Jun 17, 2013 at 20:02
  • The split used to be used for the "rollback on failure" feature. Tridion would do phase 1 for all targets, wait for those to complete and then do phase 2 for all targets. So if one of your transport actions failed, none of the targets would deploy the new content. It wasn't a proper "rollback across multiple destinations", but it emulated it very cheaply.
    – Frank van Puffelen
    Commented Jun 18, 2013 at 10:10

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