Disconnected Publishing - Deliver your content anywhere
Contensis offers a totally disconnected publishing architecture, unlike some of our competitors who claim theirs is totally disconnected, when it is not.
Throw the CMS server out of the office window and your website will still be fully functional.
We often joke in presentations that you could throw our CMS out of the office window and your website would still be fully functional. Perhaps an extreme example but it demonstrates the point.
Because of this disconnection between the CMS and the web server, it offers our customers the ability to publish their data to any server anywhere on the planet providing there is TCP/IP access. You may want to host your CMS internally behind a firewall, but actually host the site with a third party hosting company, for example.
This screenshot shows the dialogue that appears when content is published manually
To facilitate this, we use FTP to publish files to the front end delivery servers. This means that you do not need to get involved with complex permissions in Windows, all you need is an FTP Host, User and Password. With this alone the site can fully publish and update onto your front end delivery environment. In some cases the frontend delivery environment may be inside the firewall, or the whole set-up may be on the DMZ. You could even have the whole CMS architecture on the same server. This is not an issue. All that happens is that the CMS simply FTPs wherever you choose; this could be the local server, for example.
Because we don't believe in re-inventing wheels and FTP works so well, we do not offer any other delivery methods. This also keeps delivery simple and gives you the added advantage of FTP logging so you can see every transaction that is made from the CMS to the delivery servers.
Typical web servers that Contensis can publish to.
For those of you who may be concerned about security, the FTP can run on any desired port in both active and passive mode, and also support secure FTP if you have this installed on your FTP server.
If you are concerned about the cost of an FTP server, this is not an issue as there are a number of free options available. Microsoft have a free FTP server with IIS7 or 8, and a favourite of ours is FileZilla, which is an open source community project. Both of these work well.
Because Contensis supports a disconnected publishing model, publishing to any web server is possible.