Staging is a tool used to manage content publication. The concept of staging is simple: you can modify your site behind the scenes and then publish all your updates in one shot. You don’t want users seeing your web site change before their eyes as you’re modifying it, do you? The staging environment lets you make changes to your site in a specialized staging area that’s linked to a production environment. Typically the staging site is used only by content editors and site administrators, while the production environment is public. Content is published from staging to production all at once.
Site administrators can set up their staging environments locally or remotely. With Local Live staging, your staging environment and live environment are hosted on the same server. Remote Live staging has the staging and live environments on separate servers. You’ll learn more about the differences between these two staging environments and how to enable them for your portal instance.
You can also leverage the Page Versioning feature. This feature works with both Local Live and Remote Live staging and lets site administrators create multiple variations of staged pages. This allows several different versions of sites and pages to be developed at the same time. Variations can be created, merged, and published using a Git-like versioning system. In the next section, you’ll jump in to see how to enable staging.