As soon as the content in a project is ready you need to publish. This turns all the work done in the project into active content objects that are accessible over the Internet.

If your project is new, you probably will start the publish function from the project folder. If the changes are scattered around over the project then the publish process will only publish the changed content objects. You can also search for changed content and perform the publish on the search result.

Whatever approach you use, the publish process will always be an additional required step to activate your work on the content. In projects where the authors' work should be activated immediately you can choose to activate the content as soon as it is saved in the Workbench. This kind of activation type is set in the properties of the object. If you apply this for the main project folder (or any kind of folder), then all new objects in the folder will inherit this behavior by default. You can also propagate this behavior to existing dependent content objects.

In the following example we will engage the 'Activation on save' option for the 'Book: Birds' of the 'Animal information' project.' The red rectangles in front of the tree objects indicate that the book's changes are not yet activated.

Setting the activation type

Select the 'Book: Birds' in the tree and click on the 'Properties' tab on the right. Expand the 'Activation' section and select the 'On save' option. The 'On publish' option is the default.

Since the book already contains content you need to propagate the new behavior to the dependants. To achieve this, click on the 'Propagate' button to open the 'Propagate' window. This window is used to propagate almost any folder property to the containing objects. Here it is about the 'Activation' property.

The propagate window

Click 'Start' to start the process.

Confirming the propagate

And click 'Yes' to confirm. The propagate process scans the entire folder and sets the chosen property in the dependent objects.

Propagation finished

As soon as the process is finished you can close the window. If you now save the 'Book: Birds' folder or one of its dependants the red rectangle disappears. This means that the content is active when saved, you do not need to start the publish process anymore.

Content activated on save

The ability to change the activation type is determined by the security profile. Usually it will be the administrator or the project leader who decides to change this behavior. This should be considered with care because besides the manual save there are a lot of other actions that include a save operation, for example when content is checked in or when you close the Workbench. So, remember that also authoring errors can perhaps become unwillingly active.

Although it is no longer required now to publish the 'Book: Birds' folder, you still will be able to engage the publish process as shown in the next image.

Engaging the publish process

This a required behavior on each folder. The publish process always scans the entire folder to find out the candidate-to-publish objects. If all dependent objects have the same activation type as here in this example, then nothing is published.

Nothing to publish

But if a folder would contain changed objects with the 'On publish' activation type then these need to be included in the publish process. So, you need to be able to engage the publish on any folder at any time.

The object classes

You can also indicate the activation type in the object class. If new objects of that class are added, then these inherit the activation type from the class. In this way you don't have to set it manually in the object properties. The  details about the object classes are explained in setting up structured authoring. Here,  we just concentrate on how to indicate the activation type. This is done in the following way.

Opening the object classes from the menu bar

Select the 'Window > Object classes' item on the Workbench main menu bar to open the 'Object classes' window.

The 'Object classes' window

Click on the 'Organize folder classes' button. The window that opens shows a list of all available folder classes.

The folder classes

Select the 'Folder' item in the list and click on 'Show details. Two windows open.

Setting the activation type in the class

The left window shows the 'Added classes' list. This is the list of object classes that can be contained in the 'Folder' class. Select the 'Book' item. The window on the right shows the properties to be assigned to each new 'Book' in a 'Folder'. Scroll down until you see the 'Activation' section and select the 'On save' option. Next, click on the 'Submit changes' button on the left window and class the windows.

Now, each time you add a new 'Book' in a 'Folder' it will have the 'On save' activation type.