One of the nicest features of Publish is the ability “stage” new or edited web pages. The staging server is part of Publish and you can access pages you put there by simply adding “test” to your page’s URL.

For example, let’s say you need to edit the page is currently here: http://sou.edu/admissions/visitus/preview.html

You want to make some significant changes, and you don’t want those pages to go live before they’re looked at by other members of your group.

What you would do is check the page out in the regular way, make your edits, but rather than publish the page you would select “stage now” from the action pulldown in the upper right. Don’t forget to hit the all-powerful “go” button next to your selection.

Once you have done this you can view your changes by adding “test” to the page’s url.

The original URL was: http://sou.edu/admissions/visitus/preview.html

The staged URL would be: http://test.sou.edu/admissions/visitus/preview.html

The staging server is only visible within the SOU network, so don’t worry if you have made an error on the page… it’s not visible to the world at large.

You can share that staged URL with anybody you like within the SOU network and they will be able to see the changes you have made in their browser.

Once the changes are approved and the page is ready to be published you would return to the page in Publish and this time select “publish now” from the pulldown. This will publish the page and make it visible to the denizens of the interwebs.