I am doing volunteer work for a non-profit. They have no technical staff..sigh. Anyway I have created a site for them with about 125 pages. So, they are getting close to going live, I took a look at staging. Read the docs and still am some what confused.

In the documentation it states that if you have a site with a lot of content, then staging might not work. That surprised me, isn't staging the point to being able to create content and preview it before publishing to live server?

Anyway, I have a couple of questions about the staging approach.

1. Do I use another LR instance colocated on server? This takes up disk space but might be best solution.
2. In 'Control Panel' under 'Portal' section is tick for selecting sites or global. When clicking on 'Global', 'Staging' tab appears next to it. Does this mean if I create a site within the same portal that is a mirror of production site, I can then publish to prod site? What would be the disadvantage to that approach?

I am sure many of you experienced admins could share some light on this. Maybe David, Hitoshi, or Juan? Putting you guys on the spot here :-).

thanks

bump: I really would like to hear from some of you seasoned LR administrators. I am taking a non-profit live next week and I am concerned about doing staging correctly. Based on views of this post, others are interested as well.

For those of us that are a one person shop, we can not afford LR's support, so it would be nice if community could help out.

thanks

1-About staging, you have two options: local or remote staging. In local staging you use the same database, in remote you use another liferay installation. You can choose
whatever fits well with your hardware resources. Local staging works well BTW and is easier enabling it (only few clicks).
2-Yes, when publishing content to "Live" your staging content becomes "final" and everybody will see it.

Juan: thanks for the reply! I know when you publish the content becomes live, but what I was asking is - The documentation says staging may not work for a lot of pages. This makes me nervous :-)

Also, one other thing I am not clear about. If you are using local staging, then does this mean you have to create another site that has all the content, then publish to production site? Hope I stated that right.

thanks

1-Wow, that would make me nervous too :-D. But I don't see any problems when publishing content...You can try yourself..

2-No, there is only one site. When enabling staging, all your pages have 2 tabs in top of it where you can select your environment (Live or Staging), so you can clearly choose where you are. Changes are only possible in Staging environment, Liferay won't let you change any content in "Live" tab. Just try yourself, is very easy ;-).

Juan: Words escape me on how to convey my thanks! This really helped me to understand and not feel so nervous after reading docs. Thank you so much for taking the time.