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This page contains some background (conceptual) information about activation, that is how content gets activated (published) from an author instance to a public instance. Activation is an older implementation inherited from the 5.5 branch. Activation can still be used but is less transparent in terms of module structure than its refactored successor – publishing. Activation is installed by the Activation module and extended by the Transactional Activation module (in Magnolia EE).
How activation works
On the author instance
A Syndicator
collects the content that needs to be activated. It stores the content into an ActivationContent
object. The default BaseSyndicatorImpl
can activate content to any public instance that is configured as a subscriber. The configuration details of each subscriber are held in a Subscriber
Java bean at runtime. When you trigger an activation command, the syndicator creates an ActivationContent
object and sends it to each subscriber. There are two variations of ActivationContent
: current content and versioned content. In this context, Content
is defined by the filtering Rule
used to collect all the child nodes that are still considered to be part of the content for any given activation.
On the public instance
The Activation filter receives the content. The filter acts on the incoming request and saves the data into the repository.
Other aspects
Authentication and security
Activation is authenticated using public-key cryptography. The authentication configuration for activation is stored in /server/activation
, see Activation security for more on this.
Recursive and non-recursive activation
Magnolia supports two methods of activating content:
- Non-recursive, which activates only the selected node and its properties.
- Recursive, which activates the selected node, its properties and its children.