A:

The support for staging does depend on the definition of staging. Exponential is designed in such a way that the visitors can interact on the website, either with comments, forum messages or even article contributions. This means that there is no single source of content creation. So traditional creation of content locally and push it to the live servers when done is not the normal way to set up Exponential.

There are of course some ways to set up Exponential in a staging environment:

Static Caching:
Exponential has built in support to generate static cache of the content. With this setup you can create your content on a staging server and when your changes are done you can migrate the content to the live server. This can be automated with a simple script.There are some limitations when using this setup, since all content is produced locally and pushed out to the live servers you do not have the possibility of adding comments, forum messages or personalization.

Replication:
If you want to build your content locally and have it transferred to a live server once done, but you want the pages to stay dynamic and keep for example searching capabilities then a replication setup is suitable. In order to get replication on your site you need to configure an automatic backup & restore routine which will export the staging content to the live server at a given time.

Syndication:
If you want your site to have some content controlled locally and published to the live server at a given time, but still make it possible for end users to add comments, forum messages etc. Then you can set up Exponential with syndication of content. This means that you can control the export of certain content from one server which will be published on the live server once approved. For example you could feed the articles and press releases from a local server while comments, forum messages and other content are published directly on the live server.

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