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Publishing diagram

The following diagram shows the various stages of a publish action, from the moment a user pushes the Publish button to the moment the visitor sees the published content.

The publishing process works as follows:

  1. Publish—a user publishes content to a Target Type.
  2. Target Type—a Target Type corresponds to a Purpose in Topology Manager.
  3. Publisher Engine—the Publisher Engine interacts with Topology Manager to obtain mappings for this Publication, generates Publish Transactions based on the selected Target Type and associated Purpose, and puts them in the Publish Queue.
  4. Publisher Queue—the Publish Queue holds Publish Transactions waiting to be picked up by the Publisher Service.
  5. Publisher Service—the Publisher Service picks up Publish Transactions in the Publisher Queue, resolves and renders the items and then interacts with Topology Manager to find out which Content Delivery environment to publish to. It passes the resulting Transport Package to the Transport Service.
  6. Transport Service—the Transport Service requests the URL of Content Deployer from the Discovery Service and uses this URL to send Transport Packages to the Content Deployer Queue over an HTTP or HTTPS protocol.
  7. Content Deployer Queue—the Content Deployer Queue is the file system location where Content Deployer can pick up Transport Packages.
  8. Content Deployer—the Content Deployer picks up and processes Transport Package and passes the content to the Storage Layer.
  9. Storage Layer—the Storage Layer stores content in the Content Data Store (a file system, relational database, or both).

The publishing process is completed when the content arrives at the Storage Layer as the content is then available for Web site visitors. When a visitor requests a URL of the Web site, the Presentation Server—the server on which your SDL Web-driven Web site is hosted—retrieves content from the cache, if configured and if the content is fresh, otherwise from the database and/or file system.