Blueprint Developer Manual / Version 2506.0
Table Of ContentsCoreMedia Content Cloud organizes your sites for a given web presence in a strictly hierarchical, top-to-bottom structure starting with the root-master site. Connections between sibling nodes are unavailable and can only be expressed implicitly by a common ancestor.
The site hierarchy might be nested, thus a site derived from the master site again might have derivatives. You can trigger the localization process from your master site, directly derived sites will adapt and forward changes to their derived sites.
The examples below refer to the default configuration which comes with
CoreMedia Blueprint.
To adapt, for example, the auto-generated structure for when deriving
new sites, you can adapt this and other settings in the
SiteModel - see also
Section 5.5.3.1, “Site Model and Sites Service”.
Multi-Site Folder Structure
All sites within a web presence share a dedicated root folder, that contains
the root-master site as well as all its (nested) derived sites. Other web
presences might be placed in parallel to this folder structure below the
/Sites/ folder.
/Sites/MySite/United States/English/masterSpanish/derived from U.S. English
Canada/English/derived from U.S. EnglishFrench/derived from Canadian English
MyOtherSite/another master site structure
Example 5.7. Multi-Site Folder Structure Example
The folder structure of the root-master site and its derived sites is best kept equal to avoid the automatic recreation of removed or renamed folders during the localization workflows.
In addition to this, common aspects for all sites might be placed outside this folder structure. For details see Section 5.4.1, “Folder and User Rights Concept”.
Site Folder Structure
It is the location of the site indicator that defines the site folder. Thus, a folder containing a valid site indicator with all required properties set (like the site ID) is regarded as a site folder. The site indicator also references (as root document) the site's home page.
The site's home page is placed in Navigation, so that
the key content item structure is like this:
MySite/United States/English/MySite [Site]site indicatorNavigation/MySitesite's home page...
Example 5.8. Site Folder Structure Example
While the above describes the mandatory folder structure for a site, there are additional structures which adhere to the proposed separation of concerns in Section 5.4.1, “Folder and User Rights Concept”, thus within a site you can have several user roles taking care of different aspects of the site as there are:
Editorial content: For example, articles, images, collections etc. This is the real content of a site that is rendered to the web page. They are located in folders
Editorial,PicturesandVideos.Navigation content: Channels that span the navigation tree and provide context information, as well as their page grids (see also Section 5.4.2, “Navigation and Contexts”). These contents are located in a folder named
Navigation.Technical content: Site specific, technical content items, like actions, settings, view types, etc. They can be found in folder named
Options.
Site Interdependence
Having a site derived from its master you will have two layers of interdependence:
The site indicator points to its master site indicator.
Each derived content item points to its master annotated by the version of the master when the derived content item retrieved its last update from the master. This information is used in the update process when a new master version requires its derived contents to be localized again.
A site indicator inherits the site name from its master. If a site indicator has no master it has to define the site name, which will be used for all derived sites.
The master property is configured as weak link by default. Thus, you might
publish derived sites before (or without) publishing the master site.
Modifying the Site Structure
Whenever possible, the structure of a site should not be changed after it has been set up initially. In particular, you should not:
Change the ID of a site. If you do so, you must at least reindex its entire master site, if any. See Section 4.6.1, “Re-Indexing” in Search Manual for details on the reindexing procedure. However, the site ID might also be stored in other places that a simple reindexing will not update.
Move a content to a different site. If you do so, you must at least update the master links of the affected contents to point into the master site of the new site.
Change the locale of a site. If you do so, you must at least update the locale stored in each individual content of the site.
Change the master site of a site. If you do so, you must at least update the master links of all contents in the site.
For more information about options and challenges to restructure sites, see Section 4.9, “Changing the Site Hierarchy” in Multi-Site Manual.
Validate Sites
After significant changes of the site structure, you should run the cm
validate-multisite tool to detect inconsistencies in the content. See
Section 3.13.1.11, “Validate Multi-Site” in Content Server Manual for details.
