When it comes to creating digital solutions, it's typical you start with a problem. Liquid's digital technology team has set its sights on creating new, innovative Sitecore plugins that solve specific problems and deliver time/cost savings for our Sitecore developer community. The post below is a description of our latest effort.
To read about our previous Sitecore plugins, check out these related blog posts.
For developers, some of the biggest challenges come from racing the clock. Time plus Effort equals Progress. So, there is a huge need for efficiency in every process, universally across the board.
Version control can be a time-friendly or time-draining activity depending on how you manage it. The Liquid Publishing Owl is a Sitecore plugin that enhances an editor’s control, with detailed insight into how each publishing effort affects your website application. You’ll find it here, for free, on Github.
Created in the Name of Saving Time
Your first question might be “Why is it named Owl?” Simply put, it’s an homage to the wise bird who keeps a vigilant and sweeping eye over its dense forest habitat. The plugin offers you equally strong insight into your publishing activities.
Consider this solution in context: you have a team of editors who are painstakingly working through a build. Each time they publish pages there is an outcome that affects the entire published application or website. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s off the mark.
Knowing which specific steps caused these outcomes can take time through traditional backtracking methods, but it’s the key to moving forward with an error-free design.
The Publishing Owl plugin provides this insight. It’s like having a friendly watchful eye over your shoulder through the entire build process.
How it Works
Once installed, the Liquid Publishing Owl is accessible through the Sitecore admin panel, so the developer won’t have to break far from their workflow in order to view their relevant publication feedback.
Publishing data is presented in both high-level or detailed views, over a 7-, 14-, or 30-day time period that suits the pace of their project. They’ll see created items, updated items, and deleted items, all within context of the build. The plugin presents this information in an at-a-glance, easy to read format that provides time and date of instance, and the pages in the site that were affected by the push.
This plugin technology benefits the editors two-fold. First, it dramatically reduces time spent in tracking changes on what’s traditionally done on a page-by-page, line-by-line basis. Secondly, it provides an editor with detailed oversight over what tasks have been completed and when. It’s a fantastic way to monitor the overall health of a website build.
How to get it?
Liquid’s Publishing Owl plugin will provide editors with a new level of insight into their daily activities, which can amount to considerably reduced effort and cost savings in the long run. You can acquire the plugin by downloading it, for free, from Github