In this article let us see an introduction about Cross Site Publishing in SharePoint 2013.
Cross Site Publishing:-
New introduced concept in SharePoint 2013 with an Authoring Publishing Concept.
i.e., The actual content will be residing in a separate site collection. These contents can be accessed across any other site collection irrespective of Web Application.
The main advantage as far as I could see is, segregating the Authoring site. This makes the publishing site more secure. The author’s will not be having access to Publishing Site (End User Facing site) directly. Instead they will be having a separate site collection. (Even no master page, no proper authentication is required for that).
The second advantage is, one authoring site can be the source of more than one Publishing Site. In detail, a site collection which we are treating as an authoring can be consumed by more than one Publishing site for the data.This can be explained more in detail with a diagram.
The entire cross site publishing works based on the Search Service Application and Metadata Service Application.
With this introduction, let us see, how to use this in real world with step by step approaches.
1. Create a Authoring Site (am using the name ‘Authoring’ as it will be comfortable for understanding) with Product Catalog Template.
2. Let me have the site collection as http://sathishserver:3000/sites/ProductCatalog/
3. Let us make the Pages document Library as Content Source.
4. Hence going to the Pages document Library.
5. We need a Managed Metadata Column with that only we are going to control the Navigation.
6. Hence, am creating a New Site Column on the Pages Doc Lib itself.
7. Am naming the Site Column as “MyNavigationMetadata” with the datatype Managed Metadata.
8. On the other hand, before doing this, I have created a Term Group and the Terms as follows.
9. Now, mapping my Column with the Term SiteMap.
10. Am making it as a Mandatory Column.
11. I have created some sample pages called Page1 to Page5 and mapped the Navigation Tags Properly.
12. Publish the pages as Major Version.
13. Go to the Library Settings.
14. Catalog Settings
15. By default the screen will be like this.
16. Select the values as shown in the below figure.
17. Now the Pages Doc Lib has been published as a Source Library.
18. Now, we are done with the Authoring Site Collection. Let us go to the Publishing Site collection.
19. Before going one important thing to remember is do a Full Crawl from the Central Administration. Then only, the published content can be conneted.
20. I have created a separate Publishing Site Collection on a different web application.
21. http://sathishserver:3001/sites/Publishing
22. Go to the Site Settings.
23. Select Manage Catalog connections.
24. Click on the Connect to Catalog
25. We can see the Pages Doc Lib available.
26. Before connecting, its better we can create 2 Pages called CategoryPage.aspx and ItemPage.aspx on the Publishing Site. Let me tell you why we require later.
27. The Connection screen values are as follows.
28. You can see at the bottom. The CategoryPage and Item Page. Here, instead of creating a new page, we can give our own page.
That’s it. We successfully established a Catalog Connection. In the next article, let me show how to write a custom Content Search WebPart and display the results on the CategoryPage and ItemPages.
Leave a comment