Content Lifecycle

This page describes the flow of content from your CMS all the way into the live apps or sites. If you are troubleshooting publishing delays, it helps us enormously if you can identify which step in the process is slow.

YOUR FEED

We will configure our system to poll your feed at some interval. This is normally something between 5 minutes and an hour, but we can make it more frequent if required.

If this an RSS feed, we can configure this in Express

We also support the RSS syn:frequency tag which lets your feed tell us how often to check.

It is possible that your feed has caches as well, so it might take time for an article to be visible to us in your feed from when you published it.

If you navigate to the Syndicated Sites area you can see when each feed was last checked:

EXPRESS CMS

Once an article is saved in Express, we normally trigger an update in Distribution automatically and instantly. This is configured in the Pugpig Distribution Service settings plugin in the CMS:

If this isn’t configured, Distribution can also be configured to poll the Express CMS - normally every 5 minutes or so.

This is configured using the “cron” syntax (see https://crontab.guru/ for info)

Some clients only want content to be pulled into the Distribution Service manually, so they will use the Update Content and other buttons to do this.

DISTRIBUTION

The smaller the size of the change, the faster the content will get into Distribution. You can see the active jobs and the history/timing for every job in the system.

The system is based on queues, so things might take slightly longer if the system is busy. Note that a job that updates many editions at the same time might get placed into a lower priority queue and therefore take longer. This is to ensure that customers who are, for example, loading in back issues do not slow down the customers that are doing normal publishing.

APP OR WEB READER

Once an article or edition is available in Distribution, it should appear in the apps instantly.

However, if an existing article changes, the changes might not be reflected instantly for users that have seen the article before because we cache content on the devices. The length of time we cache it for depends on the age of the article. You can clear a browser cache in the normal way, or get in touch if you want to know how to clear the cache in the app.

Note that for end users, it isn’t an issue as they very rarely re-read an article they’ve just read in a short amount of time. However, for editorial testing it can be an issue which is why we have a mechanism to clear the app cache.