Releases and Preview concepts
Prismic allow content teams to group content changes into Content Releases. Developers can easily configure multiple Preview applications for a given Prismic repository (e.g., localhost, production, staging, etc.). The way Preview works with Prismic is detailed here.
By combining Releases and multiple Preview environments, content teams can easily preview a set of staged content into multiple environments:
This way Published (live) and WIP/planned content can live together within one unique Prismic repository.
In case of a major iteration on your application that impacts the content model (the existing custom types of your production Prismic repository), you need a separate Prismic environment to safely iterate with no risk of impacting production. Learn more about Multiple Prismic Environments.
Use case illustration
Let’s illustrate things with step-by-step flows corresponding to concrete user stories:
As a developer, while integrating a set of new templates in the “dev” environment of our application, I want to be able to populate the future content into the Prismic repository we already use in Production, and test the front-end integration with content pulled from Prismic.
- Create the new custom types corresponding to the new templates
- Make sure you have added the “dev” Preview site URL from settings/previews (e.g./ http://localhost:3000/preview)
- Under the Planned tab of your Prismic repository, create a “New templates” release
- From the “New templates” release view, create and fill in documents using the new custom types
- You can now preview each content piece independently into your “dev” environment (just hit the Preview button from the document view)
- You can also preview the whole release, the preview session will then include every content changes and additions staged into that particular release
As a developer, I want content editors to preview the “new templates” integration for approval before pushing things into Production
- Deploy your code with the new templates in a staging environment (e.g., http://www.MyStagingWebsite.com/)
- Make sure you have added the “Staging” Preview site URL from settings/previews (e.g./ http://www.MyStagingWebsite.com/preview)
- Content editors can now preview a single document, or the whole release, into the Staging environment that you have deployed
As a Content Manager, I want to validate the integration of the set of New Templates into our Staging environment
- Go to the “New Templates” release
- Hit the “Preview in Staging” button
- The Staging site opens in a browser tab and displays the set of new templates
- Just browse the website to review the new templates staged in that particular release
As a developer, after getting green lights from the Content Manager, I want to merge my new templates code into production and publish the new content
- Push your code into production
- Publish the “New templates” release!