Best Practices for content to go live

Over the time i've worked at MGM, we've been having some problems with how things go live after they are entered to the content management system.

The idea of "stage" and "production" seems to be confusing to the users. Since I made it on mgm.com a two stage click ("Click here to submit to stage", then "Click here to submit to production") the users simply click through both pages, and consider it an inconvenience (can you please remove the two pages and do both at once?).

To this end I think I will implement a "two user" policy for content to go live. The person who enters the content can submit the content for review, and the other person tests the content, then has the ability to send live. Of course I'll put in an extra user (me) who can do both ;)

Why don't users test the content? This is the question that has bugged me the most. Every single week I find someone live that wasn't tested (I can usually tell because the page is broken :S ). Constantly we reiterate how important it is to just go "look" at the page once you send the content live and see if it's even there!!

Users...

BFN

New mini CM

I have been tasked to create a mini CM. Basically it's just to add new pieces to create a monthly email. I'm creating the tables in DB Designer 4 (even though I have Visio Professional now.. I can't seem to stop using the freeware one). The design is very simple, text fields, char fields, is_active, order for the pieces. A master table which has each month and it's pieces in it.

The moderately interesting thing about this task is that I need to generate two versions. One which will be emailed to a subscriber list, and another to remain on the site with forms to request more info and links to trailers which actually work. The links to trailers on the email only link back to the links from the one on the site. Does that make sense? Oh well.. babbling again!

Another task I'm currently working on is sweepstakes code. I'm not going to cover that here, simply because I'm just going to reuse code I've written for use on the Stargate site.

On my slate for this week:

• Setting up http cache for a new site under Akamai
• Blue Hornet API syncronization
• Updates for the tools for all sites
• Adserver config (openads is VERY cool!)
• Redesign of the main database for MGM.com

Hopefully I'll get to cover the code I use for most of this (excluding Akamai and Blue Hornet.. since I doubt that's relevant to anyone else).

BFN