There are two page variation options available from the Staging Bar:
- Site Pages Variation: Different variations for a set of Site pages. For instance, you could use this if you had three separate pages and wanted to modify these pages while keeping them together as a set.
- Page Variations: Different variations for a single page. A page variation can only exist inside a Site pages variation.
You must enable page versioning in the Staging Configuration menu before the above options are available in the Staging Bar. You’ll learn more about this later.
Variations only affect pages and not the content, which means all the existing content in your staging Site is shared by all your variations. The content, however, can be displayed in many different ways for each page variation. For example, in different Site page variations, you can have different logos, a different look and feel for your pages, different applications on these pages, different configuration of these applications, and even different pages. One page can exist in just one Site page variation or in several of them. Modifying the layout type (e.g., Layout, Panel, Embedded, etc.) or friendly URL of a page, however, does affect every Site page variation. For example, if a page template is modified, those modifications are propagated to the pages configured to inherit changes from the template, overriding Staging’s Page Variations and Site Pages Variations.
You’ll learn about enabling page versioning next.
Enabling Page Versioning
Page Versioning is enabled on the Staging Configuration screen when first enabling staging.
Figure 1: You can enable page versioning for public and/or private pages.
You can enable page versioning for public and private pages. When page versioning is enabled, the page variation options are available in the Staging Bar. By default, you only have one Site pages variation and page variation which are both called Main Variation.
If you did not enable page versioning during the initial setup of your staging
environment, navigate to the Product Menu → Publishing → Staging
→ Options () →
Staging Configuration. You can enable the page versioning options there.
Using Site Pages Variations
Site pages variations are useful when you must plan multiple page sets for your Site at once. For example, consider this scenario:
If there were separate teams in your company that needed to create three drastically different page sets for your Site at the same time, they would need to create three Site pages variations. For example,
- The marketing team can give your Site a completely different look and feel for the Holidays.
- The product management team can work on a version that is planned to publish on the first of the year for a new product launch.
- The developer relations team can work on a version that is planned to publish on the upcoming Hack-a-thon day.
With this use case, having a Site pages variation for each planned page set allows three ideas to be fully planned and implemented before publication.
Another option for this scenario is to let the product management team experiment with two different ideas for the home page of the Site. This can be done by creating several page variations within the current Site pages variation of their product launch Site. You’ll learn more about page variations later.
Once you’ve created a Site pages variation, you can now navigate to its home page and change the logo, apply a new theme, move applications around, change the order of the pages, configure different apps, and more. The other variations aren’t affected. You can even delete existing pages or add new ones (remember to Mark as Ready for Publication when you are finished with your changes). When you delete a page, it is deleted only in the current variation. The same happens when you add a new page. If you try to access a page that was deleted in the current variation, Liferay informs you this page is not enabled in this variation and you must enable it.
Figure 2: Select the *Enable* button to create a missing page in the current Site pages variation.
To publish a variation to the live Site, click on Publish to Live in the staging menu and then select Publish to Live. Publications can also be scheduled independently for different variations. For example, you could have a variation called Mondays which is published to the live Site every Monday and another one called Day 1 which is published to the live Site every first day of each month.
Using Page Variations
You can also have variations for a single page inside a Site pages variation, which lets you work in parallel on different versions of a page. For example, you might work on two different proposals for the design of the home page for a Holidays Site pages variation. Page variations only exist inside a Site pages variation.
Once you’ve created a page variation, you can choose it from the dropdown menu on the Staging Bar. You can always switch between different variations by clicking on them from the Staging Bar.
Once you’ve modified the page variation to the way you want, mark it as Ready for Publication. Only one page variation can be marked as ready for publication and that is the one that gets published to the live Site. To publish a variation to the live Site, click on Publish to Live in the staging menu and then select Publish to Live.
Managing Variation Permissions
It’s also possible to set permissions on each variation, so certain users have access to manage some, but not all variations. To do this,
-
Navigate to the Staging Bar’s Options button (
) and select the variation type you want to configure.
-
Select the desired variation’s Actions button (
) and select Permissions.
-
Configure the variation’s permissions and then click Save.
Figure 3: Configure the roles that can access and modify your variation.
Awesome! You now know how to manage variation permissions!