Publishing in sitecore

In Sitecore publishing has very important role. When you create or edit items it is required to publish these items to see them on your website. When you publish an item it is copied from master database to web database.

Why publish?

Whenever a content editor creates new content or edit existing content it is saved in to master database and that content will not be visible on the website until it will be published (copies into web database).

Sitecore publishing modes

There are three different types of publishing mode in sitecore to publish the content. You can select the different publishing modes as per your requirement.

1)  Republish -> Publish Everything

As the name itself says, this method publishes all publishable items without comparing one by one (even though the items have not changed). This is the most expensive option if you are publishing on a big website. It is intended to be used when you are publishing to a new web database, if you are restoring a backup of the master database or similar situations.

2)  Smart Publish -> Publish differences between Source and Target Database

This publishing mode is much faster than republish. When you choose smart publish, it reads data from the target database and compares each item with the master’s version. If it find any difference in the item since it is last published. The item will be published.

3)  Incremental Publish -> Publish Only Changed Items

This is the fastest way of publishing because in this Sitecore does not have to do any comparisons to identify the changed item. Every time an item is added or modified in Sitecore, it is stored into a publishing queue table of master database. The incremental publish reads the data from the publishing queue table and update the publishing target databases. In this publishing mode only those items which have been modified are published.