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On the surface, both the modules and apps associated with publishing and activation, that is their modules and associated apps serve  serve the same purpose: publish content from an author instance to a public instance:

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Nevertheless, the internals of this process are different:

• Activation is an older implementation inherited from the 5.5 branch, which . Activation can nevertheless still be used in the 5.6 branch. instead of publishing, but it is structurally and also partly functionally inferior to the newer publishing implementation.
  
  For more information about activation please read: 
  
  
  • Activation overview
  • Activation module
  • Transactional Activation module
  • Activation Tools app
  • Activation errors
  • Activation security
  • Subscribers

• Publishing is a refactored version of Publishing is a refactored successor to activation. The original Activation module has been broken into multiple Publishing submodules, see the module structure. The driving decision was to have a set of maintainable and extensible components. Another reason was to remove deprecated code. The core activation concepts remained remain the same. Despite the transport layer is still using the HTTP protocol, publishing allows to easily plug in any type of transport layer.
  

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• The new publishing implementation also allows you to define and use custom publishing operations with which you can publish content to something that is not a Magnolia public instance, for example to a custom API or a Content Delivery Network.
  
  For more information about publishing please read: 
  
  
  • Publishing overview
  • Publishing module
  • Publishing Transactional module
  • Publishing Tools app
  • Publishing errors
  • Receivers
  • Activation security

Upgrading from activation to publishing

The bundles and webapps in the 5.6 branch are shipped with publishing by default. If you are migrating from a pre-5.6 Magnolia branch and intend to replace activation with use publishing, please see the Publishing vs Activation and custom commands section on the Upgrading to Magnolia 5.6.x page.

Replacing publishing with activation

Using activation is still possible, but only after replacing the Publishing module and the Publishing Transactional module with the Activation module and the Transactional Activation module, respectively. You can do this in two ways:

• Remove all the publishing JARs from the ../WEB-INF/lib folders of your author and public instances. Add the activation JAR files in their place.
• Exclude the publishing dependencies from the POM and add the old activation dependencies.