After you finish your implementation on your development server, you will want to move it along to a staging environment, test it there, and then move it to your production environment. This video shows that process step by step.
Hey everybody it’s Doug. In this video we want to talk about publishing your property from development through staging and to production. Now this is really going to consist of three things. One is as you can see here, that we’re going to move your library, your initial setup library, from development through staging, to production and it’ll end up over here on the right in published. Okay that’s one thing. Another thing that we’re going to do is we’re going to get the embed codes for staging and production and we need to put those on our sites, on our staging server, and our production servers. So that’s another thing you’re going to need to do. We’ll talk about that in a minute. And the third thing is, and maybe we’ll do this first, so we need to create three report suites for staging and production and then make sure those are set correctly in the analytics extension configuration. So we’ll go to our report suite manager in analytics, we’ve gone to Admin Report Suites, and this has given us a list of our report suites, and here is our GeoMetrics Clothiers Dev. And we don’t have a stage and prod yet so we need to create those. So we’re going to create a new report suite.
And instead of creating one from a template, we’re going to actually create it from an existing report suite. So we come down here to our GeoMetrics Clothiers Dev, and we use that as our template because now all the settings that we’ve set up, all the reports that we’ve named, and all the settings and everything, that will be duplicated over to our new report suite. So now we can simply come down, we can put in our new report suite ID, remember we’re going to have a prefix of TMD so we’ll start with a dash. And I’ll put in Geo dash Clothiers dash stage. And that will be our report suite ID for the staging. And we’ll put in something friendly, right? GeoMetrics Clothiers Stage or staging. Whatever you want there. And we’ll put in our time zone. And we’ll put in mountain time zone like we did in our dev report suite. And we don’t have to put in the URL on the page, it’s fine. Go Live Date is fine, that’s a couple days from now. And this is staging one so again it might not be that many page views per day maybe it’s you know 1,000 for testing or maybe it’s 10,000 for testing, whatever. And then we’ll create our report suite.
Okay and we can see that the report suite TMD geo-clothiers-stage has been successfully created and we’re going to do it one more time for production, so we’ll just do that real quick here.
We’ll need to up our page views to whatever that number is going to be. Now for testing, I don’t want to freak out our development team so I’m going to leave it relatively low. But you put your real numbers here so that we can know exactly how much hardware to set aside for you for your estimated page views per day on your production report suite. So on your real site on the production servers.
Okay so our production report suite has been successfully created as well, and we’ll just kind of go back to our list. Take a look. And there they are. Dev, stage, prod. Good now we jump back into launch, because you’re going to want to set that in our extension for analytics. So we go back to extensions, configure analytics, and now instead of having our dev report suite in all three places, which was never going to be what we wanted, we can actually drop this down, and put in our staging report suite. So actually I can just take this, we had that already, but I can copy it there and then just do stage.
And we copy it here, and put prod. Okay. So now we have our dev report suite for devs. Staging for staging, production for production, and so when we actually get our numbers going through those, it’ll actually send to those report suites. Save that and build.
Okay and that’s all done. So we’re good, now we can go back to publishing. And we can start to move this initial setup library through staging and production. Now, if you are kind of a one person shop, then you’ve probably done all of your testing on the development servers and you’re ready to go. If you’re not and other people need to test it, then get them to test it, and once you are satisfied with that, you can take this drop down, and you can say submit it for approval. Yep want to submit that. And now it’s in the submitted area here, and if you have multiple people that are going to test this and give the final okay on it, then they will be able to have the permissions to come in here. Again those permissions can be set up in the Adobe Admin console, where the rights and all the privileges and those things are all set up. Uh so you can actually go on here and do it yourself if you’re kind of a one man shop. So if you submitted it, and you’re only a one person crew here, then you can go in and then you can build it for staging.
Okay so we can see that that is successfully built on staging. Now, how are we going to test that on staging? Well, it’s ready for it here, but potentially we haven’t put the embed codes on our site in the staging server. So, at some point here before you really go through all this process, you’re going to want to go to environments, you’re going to want to get the staging embed codes.
Copy that.
And then you’re going to want to implement that on your site. So for example, if I jump over to my site, and this is my index.php, so if this were on my staging server, then just like I did on dev, I would put that into the head of my page, and it will look a little different than this, 'cause of course this one said development, so lets pretend that was and I didn’t have that there. We’ll take that out. And then we’ll put in our staging embed code. And you can see that it says staging. Now of course you’re probably not going to hard code it like this, but you’re going to put it in some kind of an include so that it’s on all your files of your site on your staging server. But that’s where you’re going to get the code. And then on your production server, you’re going to actually include then of course the production embed code. So this will be your production embed code, it’ll kind of look like this, it won’t say staging and it won’t say development. And so that will then utilize the production environment in launch and because we can figure the analytics extension with the production report suite, then on your production site, it’ll start sending that data into your production report suite. And of course you’re going to want to test it all along the way, in development, test it on staging, and then again test it on production to make sure it’s okay. So we jump back over to our publishing.
And after it has been thoroughly tested on staging of course, then we can submit and approve that for publishing.
And it’s approved. And then when we’re ready to go, we can build and publish it to production.
And when it’s done it moves over to published. It has when it was published, time and date, and now again it will go into your report suite for production because that is what we assigned to it with our environment. So we are good to go and you’re ready. Now before we leave this I will say that now when you want to add something more to your site, and you want to add some additional tracking, you simply create a new development library, test it, it will include everything upstream and the new things and then you can test that and when it’s ready again, you can move it along through staging and production and keep on going. And again remember always to test it in development and staging and always make sure that you document it here in the SDR, and the business requirements document as well, and that you’re setting up the variables and the admin console and going through all the steps that we’ve been through, through these videos. So good luck.