Site Studio Publisher (SSP) FAQs (Doc ID 1262270.1)

Last updated on MARCH 04, 2024

Applies to:

Oracle WebCenter Content - Version 11.1.1.2.0 and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Purpose

The purpose of this FAQ is to consolidate articles for commonly faced issues for Site Studio Publisher (SSP) in a categorical manner. There are several articles in the Oracle knowledge base for this product and this FAQ aims at providing a classification of the notes in a categorically organized fashion to facilitate searching for notes of a similar topic.

Site Studio Publisher creates a static snapshot of a dynamic site by traversing all the links in a Web site (visiting all of the linked pages) and downloading a copy of each page and all of the resources (images, flash movies, and so on) on each page. Your entire Web site, including the content of queries, layout pages, fragments, contributor data files, and native documents, are then copied and published to the new server.

The most efficient use of a dynamic site would have immediate updates and automatically update only the changed areas of the Web site. Because Site Studio Web sites are dynamic and created using a large number of variables, it is very difficult to track and publish the affected areas of the Web site in a reliable and consistent manner. Site Studio Publisher can selectively process, or not process, pages on a Web site based on different control methods. When each asset does not need to be compared each time, then it is much easier to keep the static site up to date, and the site owner can easily control the process.

Site Studio Publisher operates from an initial list of available links, and then compares them to a previous version of links used by Site Studio Publisher. The use of controls and filters can control the list, and also limit Site Studio Publisher to using only certain parts of the list. The first time Site Studio Publisher examines a Web site, all links are examined and added to the list.

When Site Studio Publisher examines a page and determines that it has changed, the page is scrapped and delivered to the static location. SSP will perform an MD5 Digest that generates a unique number and will compare that number to the next evaluation of the page; if the number is not the same then the page is scraped and redelivered to the client.

It is important to note that if a linked file or image changed but the URL link or the image and/or size remains the same then you see no updates to this layout on the static site.

Full Publish and Publish Now:

Typically an IT group will have at a minimum of two jobs for a given web site. The first job is a full publish scheduled to run less frequent during off peak hours for the server. The full publish will crawl the entire web site and deliver the site to the static location.

The second job is an incremental publish and will include the "Publish Now" option. The "Publish Now" job will "NOT" publish the web site when a user modifies a layout page and clicks the "Publish Now" option at the top of the web page (if this option has been enabled by the web admin). The "Publish Now" option simply adds the layout page to the Manifest URL in the UserMarkedPages element. To see this open the job properties and copy/paste the Manifest URL to a browser and click the Publish Now in a layout page; refresh the browser. The pages listed in the manifest will be re-evaluated the next time the "Publish Now" job executes; this could happen manually or via a set schedule. Note that setting the Publish Now to every hour or half hour should suffice. caution should be made that setting a Publish Now to shorter intervals could lead to the site becoming inconsistent if the changes are widespread and there are a lot of links between pages.

Notes on the Publish Now:

The Publish Now was designed as an optimized way to get the content of specific pages onto the scraped site with as little overhead as possible. This was a deliberate decision not to follow links from the page. SSP can only see "a page" coming down the http pipe - and will have no idea whether the linked files of that page have been updated or not. If "Publish Now" were to check every link it found on a "Publish Now" page, the crawler would eventually end up crawling the entire website and lose any efficiency gains. But, SSP will crawl NEW links that it finds and skip any link that it has seen before. In "normal" situations, the links would be to other pages, and SSP expects that those pages would have been marked "Publish Now" if relevant.

Authentication:

For most configurations when creating a new SSP job be sure to select Authentication of "LoginForm" since you will be connecting to the server to scrape a dynamic site.

Troubleshooting:

1. Check for data files or layout pages in a workflow if the items do not appear on the static site after a scheduled publish.
2. Check that the file has been indexed and currently in a released state.
3. Check the security of the file and the user configured in the SSP job.
4. Check the permissions of the static files in the static location.
5. SSP operates by viewing the delivered page through a simple http pipe; can the dynamic site be loaded in a web browser(?).

NOTE: Since this FAQ is a consolidation effort, the articles linked in this note may span different releases of Site Studio Publisher. Please note the correct release mentioned in each note as applicable in your implementation.