No matter if, for example, changing the site type from translation to synchronization or restructuring the hierarchy of your sites: You should always consider the implications of your changes. For endeavours like these, you can reduce complexity and risks by ensuring some preconditions. This section provides a summary of the most important preconditions to consider before applying such changes.

The preconditions to fulfill are:

Complete Pending Workflows

This especially applies to translation workflows, as, by nature, they have a longer lifetime than synchronization workflows:

Ensure, that any localization workflows within your affected sites are completed. If not doing so, you may experience your pending workflows to escalate or to cause inconsistencies in the content items of your sites.

Find Pending Workflows.  As you may not see all relevant workflows in CoreMedia Studio, consider using the command line tool cm processes: Section 3.5.7, “Processes” in Workflow Manual.

Content Items are Checked-In

Ensure that all content items in the affected sites are checked in.

Depending on the type of change, you may or will need to adapt content items like adjusting the master version or the ignoreUpdates flag. To do so, administrative users can override a checked-out-by-other state by forcing the check-in. It is much more transparent though for editors to take over the check-in of their content items themselves.

Content Items are Up-to-Date

Ensure that all content items within your affected sites are up-to-date in terms of the translation state. If not doing so, subsequent required steps to update the master-versions of the content items may be more complex or even not manageable at all.

Editorial Work Stopped

While applying the changes, no editorial work should be done within the affected sites. This is especially important, if your applied changes cause mildly irregular states of your sites while applying the changes. This applies to but is not limited to changing the site hierarchy.

Multi-Site State is Valid

Any issues in the affected sites may impair the change process. Make sure your affected sites are all valid.

For a start, you can check for issues within your site by enabling the search filter Issues in the library of CoreMedia Studio, searching within the category Localization.

For more thorough checks, you can also use the command line tool cm validate-multisite as described in Section 3.13.1.11, “Validate Multi-Site” in Content Server Manual.

Expect Issues

Due to the complexity of the multi-site feature, it is not uncommon to find issues in the sites. You may find even more issues after applying comprehensive changes within the site hierarchy.

A process of first validating the sites and fixing all relevant reported issues before applying changes will help to identify new issues that occur after the changes. Also, it is good practice to eventually validate the multi-site state after applying the changes, to ensure frictionless editorial experience after the change.