Previewing and publishing

Publish content immediately

  • Content that has been approved enters into the t4 publishing cycle and is published to www.gla.ac.uk at 1am every day
  • In exceptional circumstances, it is possible for the web team to publish content immediately
  • The content needs to have published to the staging server, t4.gla.ac.uk, before we can copy it to the live server
  • You should preview your content on the staging server to make sure your changes are ready to be copied live
  • Visit the live page, replace 'www' in the url with 't4' and press enter to view the staging server version

Preview content on the staging server

  • As well as previewing content in t4, you can preview published content on the staging server t4.gla.ac.uk.
  • Approved content is published to the staging server on the hour, every hour. The publish normally finishes at 20 past the hour.
  • Access to the staging server is restricted to campus
  • For example, the Ask a Student web site may be previewed at t4.gla.ac.uk/study/studentlife/askastudent/
  • The staging server will only show:
    • content that has been approved
    • sections that contain approved content

Publish content that cannot be viewed off-campus

t4 is used for publishing to the University's public web server. If you have confidential or sensitive information that you need to share with a limited audience, please use a more suitable platform: such as a shared network drive or Sharepoint. Restricting sections to campus should be used to stop content for an internal audience hampering the journeys of external audiences. 

  • Create the section that is to be restricted to campus
  • Complete the t4 support form, giving details of the section, and the web team will arrange for access restrictions to be applied.
  • Important:
    • Access to the restricted section will be limited to campus. This means that students and guest visitors also have the potential to view this content when published.
    • All items in the Media Library are publically available.
    • If a moderator renames the restricted section, or renames any parent of the restricted section this will remove the restriction

Shorten a web address

The name of a t4 section is used to create the web address for that section. Web addresses can become quite long as you add more and more subsections to your website. The 'Output URI'  feature allows you to define a shorter name for the section, which results in a shorter web address.  Note: the section name will still be used within your website navigation.  

Select Site Structure using the icon. Navigate to the relevant section. Select the section, or use the drop-down 'Action' button and select 'Edit'.

In the box named 'Output URI' enter a shorter version of your section name. For example, you might want to shorten the t4 section 'home > Schools > School of Chemistry > Research > Postgraduate research opportunities' from

  • www.gla.ac.uk/schools/schoolofchemistry/research/postgraduateresearchopportunities

to

  • www.gla.ac.uk/schools/chemistry/research/postgraduate

by entering an Output URI of 'postgraduate'

Use full words in the Output URI instead of abbreviations where possible, as using natural language helps improve your search engine (Google) rankings. For example, in our example we would score no web address ranking points for a search that involved the word 'postgraduate ' if we had created a shorter address of  www.gla.ac.uk/schools/chemistry/research/pro.  Of course, there are circumstances when it is acceptable to use an acronym eg. when it is very well known or it is the only way to avoid a very long web address.

Only alphanumeric characters can be used: no spaces, punctuation, special characters, or upper-case characters should be used.