Omniture Publish & SiteSearch
Publish is Omniture’s proprietary hosted CMS for large websites. Reusing content on multiple web pages, or syndication, is the specialty of this product which excels at managing sites with thousands of pages. Publish uses a PHP-like proprietary templating language.
Strengths of Omniture Publish
- Hosted Service. The web CMS is hosted on Omniture’s servers, eliminating the tasks of installation and software maintenance. Users log into their Omniture accounts to view and edit their site in Publish. At publish time, data and templates are merged and pushed out to your live site as static pages.
- Stage and Live Environments - Changes made in the Publish environment can be pushed to the live site, or to a staged site, which is a non-public replica of the live site.
- Workflow. Edit access to web pages is tightly controlled by user and group permissions. Multi-step workflow may be used to assign content creation, approval, staging and deployment to different users. Alerts inform assigned users when a new stage is reached.
- Versioning & locking. Users check out files to make changes, locking the file to prevent other users’ edits from being lost. A new version of the file is created each time it’s checked in, and users can browse through the file history and revert to a previous version. Also, deleted files can be restored.
- Integration with Omniture’s Search and Site Catalyst. Omniture’s SiteSearch product and its SiteCatalyst analytics package are both industry leaders in their category. All of Omniture’s products are designed to complement and extend each other.
Omniture Reseller and Development Partner
Quinn Interactive is an Omniture integration partner and reseller. We have over six years of experience building large complex websites with Omniture’s Publish and SiteSearch tools. We integrate Omniture Publish for national magazines, international corporate extranets, product marketing sites, and more. And we’ve been doing it ever since Publish was first introduced.
User Experience with Publish
Editors work with two types of edit screens in Publish. When editors check out a file, they see Marker View, which displays the web page with orange markers next to elements that may be edited. Once a marker is clicked, editors see the Edit View, which is a form showing editable fields, field names and optional descriptions.
Once edits are complete, the editor completes the task by either publishing the page or passing the task forward to a reviewer.
Administrators are not subject to workflow rules, and may make changes to web pages or templates from the Design View—a split screen with site hierarchy on the left and web page on the right. Many tools, options, and reports exist for administrators, including:
- Activity reports, useful for tracking down problems
- WebDav or Dreamweaver editing options
- Publish scheduling
Implementing Publish
Because Publish is hosted, there’s no software installation; only some website setting choices are required. Whereas other web CMS start with a generic web site with pre-built templates, Publish offers a blank slate. Since no assumptions are made about the purpose of the site at installation, Publish is tremendously flexible and useful for unique and complex sites.
Developers use the Publish templating language to build templates. The language facilitates building edit fields, and manipulating the data entered into those fields.
A Publish implementation begins by adding libraries of publish functions, common edit fields, and reusable terms. The first template built is for the site’s most generic pages. It combines edit fields; page layout; and common page elements such as the header, footer, and navigation. All subsequent templates are based on this generic template, but substitute certain page-specific elements.