Content Management

The content management system is designed to provide a suite of tools for making changes to the various elements housed in the marketAgility content repository. Embedded within the tools is a basic workflow system that allows a content manager to control each element's release to the production environment using an "online status" indicating its current state of editing. For all content items, a status “Staging only - Do Not Migrate” meanst that the item is currently being edit and the changes are not ready to be moved to production. A Status of “Ready For Production - Will Migrate” means that the item edits have been completed and the changes are ready to be moved to production. Finally, “On Production” means that the most recent changes are now live in the production environment.

Migration from the staging/QA environment occurs in a scheduled batch process that can be adjusted to meet the needs of your merchandising team. Typically run hourly, the migraton process looks for all items that are in the "Ready for Production - Will Migrate" status and then copies them one at atime to the production environment. As each item is migrated, the Online Date value is updated to indicate the exact time and day that the most recent changes appeared in production.

The primary method of editing content in the system is through the administration tools; however a batch import capability is also present for achieving bulk updates or additions to the content repositories. In the batch process, a flat file containing the content is placed in a predefined location and imported through a series of translators called feeds. Any content that is new is automatically set as “Staging only” so that a merchandiser has the opportunity to make the content "customer friendly" before it appears on your live site. Once a Content Manager has reviewed the content for correctness, the item is updated to reflect a “Ready for Production” state and migrated at the next scheduled migration time.

Merchants with in-house developers can also integrate their systems with the marketAgility content repository by using the APIs to create and update content. This allows your team to better synchronize the changes that you make in your back office with when they appear on the site, and significantly reduces the amount of time to set up your products and other content