Launches and publishing

When you want to publish a page, you've got 2 options: publish now or publish later with scheduled publishing

When working on big content changes, using a Launch is a great way to prevent unintended publications.

1. Using a scheduled publish

When scheduling a publish on a page, you tell AEM to publish your page on a certain day/hour, the way it looks at that specific moment:

Eg: When editor Ronald schedules a publish on Friday 14:00 for a page, it will be published the way it looks on Friday 14:00, so when editor Laura makes changes to the page on Friday at 11:00, those will be published too. Or, when Laura allready publishes the page on 11:00, Ronalds changes will be visible as well at 14:00.

How to

In the treeview in AEM sites, the "manage publication button" is visible

Start the scheduled publish by clicking the button "manage publication", next to the "quick publish" button.

In the next step, you can choose to publish the page at a certain time in the future

2. Launches

Using a launch, you can work on one or multiple pages for a long time, without having to worry it will be visible on production suddenly.

Consider the following use cases :

Eva frequently updates the homepage, while Guiseppe wants to add some content on this page for a big event in the future. Guiseppe is afraid that Eva will publish the content, and on the other hand he 's afraid that he'll have to do all Eva's changes again on his page.
Ronald is not happy with a Sabato subpage because the template is not flexible: he wants to delete it and use another template like a Standard-content-page.

In both cases, you want information from the old page/version on your newer version. This is where a Launch can help:
When creating a Lauch, AEM creates a copy of your page that will remain in sync with the original: when an original has changed, so will the new one.
When you're finished, you will "promote" the Launch: it will replace the old page in AEM with the new one.You still have to publish this page

How to: Starting a Launch

In the create button, choose "Launch"

From anywhere in the website, choose "Launch" in the "create" button in the upper right corner

Add pages

You'll see an overview screen in which you can add pages to the "Launch" . You can add as many pages as you like.

choose to include subpages or not, and go to the next step

In this step, you can have several options:

use another template
inherit the changes of the original page or not
set a launch date : on this day, the launch will be promoted

When opening your page, you'll notice you're not working on the original page any more, but on a launch. You can see this in the url. If you want to cancell inheritance (read: being in sync with the old page) of certain components, you can do this by clickin the chain-icon on the component itself.

How to: Working on a Launch

reference panel on the left side of the treeview in AEM sites

Whenever you want to edit the launch-page or the launch itself, just go to the reference panel on the left after you've selected the page that's going to change.

You'll see all the possible options: change the launch, change the page etc.

reference panel on the left side of the treeview in AEM sites

Happy with the result? Promote your launch so all the old pages will be replaced in AEM.

Be aware: you still have to publish all the changed pages before your visitors will see the new pages