Live Copy
Magnolia’s Live Copy module is a very powerful tool to manage multisite installations that share similar content, without duplicating efforts. Live Copy allows you to quickly create live copies of a master site. The copies maintain a live relationship with the master site, which means they inherit content and properties from their original source.
When you update content on your master site, you can flexibly enable or disable these changes across the live copies. As a result, you can perform updates much faster and eliminate the manual work of copying similar pages to multiple locations across your websites.
We recommend Live Copy for companies that fulfill these conditions:
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Online presence shares the majority of its content (80-90%) with their localized copies
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Presence spans across multiple locations, countries, regions, and/or languages
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There is a centralized marketing or editorial team managing your Master content
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Your goal is to reduce the manual localized effort to maintain your multi-installation websites
Live Copy also serves exceptionally well for Internationalization and can be used with our Visual SPA Editor.
Is Live Copy for me?
Before we go any further, let’s investigate whether or not it’s suitable for your project. As you can see in the decision tree below, those who most benefit from the Live Copy module are centralized teams that share the bulk of content across sites using a multi-tree structure for each language, which is managed by local editors to be adapted and customized as needed.
| Feature | Notes | ||
|---|---|---|---|
Works well in combination with our Internationalization capabilities, Live Copy helps you meet your multi-language requirements. A single master website holds all your shared global content and can be pushed to your local sites for various subsidiaries or regions to translate and publish.
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Live Copy works with the Visual SPA Editor when template annotations are used as opposed to template definitions. |
Useful terms and base principles
Before we dive any deeper into Live Copy, it is neccessary to know some specific terms used in the context of live copy:
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Master - The original source of the content you copy.
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Live copy - A copy of the master produced by clicking the Create live copy action. Initially, a live copy is a simple replica of the master.
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Relink - This action is enabled by default. It makes sure that the links in the live copy site point to pages within live copy instead of the master page. If you’d like the links in your live copy site to point to the original site, uncheck the Automatically Relink box when clicking on Create live copy. Read more about this here.
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Push - Sends changes made in the Master version to the Live Copy versions without publishing the affected pages.
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Push and publish - Like the Push action, but it also triggers the publication workflow for the affected pages. Note, that your content is not actually published, depending on your publication workflow; the process is only initiated.
There are some core base principles we need to keep in mind when using live copy:
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Live Copy is one directional. This means that changes are pushed from the
masterto a live copy page and not the other way around. Any components that are unreferenced will lose their order and end up at the bottom of a page. Themasteris the source of truth with Live Copy. -
You should protect local content that you do not want updated from
masterpushes. -
Many of our Live Copy use cases involve websites with different languages. Because
masteris the source of truth with Live Copy and therefore, translations are managed at themasterlevel, local editors need access to themastersite.For more on this topic, see protecting content from master changes.
Live Copy use cases
As we’ve stated before, Live Copy is an ideal tool to manage multi-market and multi-language installations.
Use case: car rental company
A car rental company has hundreds of branches spread across different cities and countries. The headquarters of the company manages the global content shared by all of the websites.
The local branches manage content specific to their own requirements, such as country-specific legal terms and conditions, product details of the vehicles available in their area or special deals to boost their presence on the local market.
Your marketing and editorial teams are decentralized but a substantial amount of content and campaigns are provided by a central content team. You can use live copy to synchronize the locally created content (live copy) with the centrally created one (master).
Use case: editorial team
The editorial team in headquarters prepares global campaigns and landing pages to be rolled out in multiple countries. From a global content hub, this content can be pushed to shared pages in different regions.
Local editorial teams manage and edit their pages independently (localization and translation) while still able to leverage and integrate the master content provided by headquarters.
