How do I implement website clusters & reviews?

Hi, this is Sandra, and in this video I’m going to walk you through our Global Content Cluster and Review features. We have a general tutorial video on Global Content in our Helpcenter. In this video, we are going to focus on how you can use Global Content in an even more secure, structured, and automated way. This is especially important if you’re not just synchronizing content across maybe 10 websites, but maybe hundreds or even thousands of websites.

You’ll find Global Content Clusters on a network level as an individual menu item here in the Global Content menu. With clusters, you can automate Global Content actions. For example, you can automatically synchronize all posts of a certain post type from website A to website B without having to do that manually all the time. And you can do that with or without a review process in between. Because, as you know, Global Content is a very powerful feature, and, as it is with all powerful features, there’s a certain risk of errors. These errors could maybe have a result on thousands of websites. So, there are certain cases where we have to be very careful with what we do, and therefore we have some special review features.

So, let’s just start with clusters in general. This is the cluster overview, where you can see all the clusters that you have in your Global Content network. You can see which contents from which websites are automatically synchronized to which other websites and whether it’s with or without reviews. You can edit those clusters, and you can also delete clusters. If you do so, you are going to be asked what you want to do with the posts that are in this cluster. Do you want to retain the connections, so should these posts still be synchronized? Do you want to make these posts static so they are no longer synchronized? Or do you maybe even want to delete the connected posts? We don’t want to delete anything now; we want to create a new cluster.

At first, we have to give it a name. Let’s just say “Test Cluster,” and now let’s maybe create an automation that automatically synchronizes all posts from my Betting Helpcenter to my Helpcenter website. To do that, at first, I have to select the destination website, which in this case would be my Helpcenter website. I can add any number of sites here; let’s just do one. We’ll take a look at reviews later. For now, we want to define which content we want to automatically synchronize to this Helpcenter website. At first, we need to start with where the content comes from. And the content in my example comes from the Betting Helpcenter. Then we have to define which content we want to synchronize. So, in my case, we are just going to go with posts. Then we can define if all posts that meet the criteria that we define below should automatically be made global, so they can automatically be synchronized. Or if you don’t check this box, only those posts that have been made global manually will be included in the cluster. Let’s just make all.

Then we can filter the posts if we want to and only say, “Okay, we only want certain categories, for example, to be synchronized and the other posts we don’t need,” or we could also say, “We only want the two latest posts to be synchronized,” or only posts from a certain date. You can also filter by date; you can say a single date, range or also say, “Okay, all posts from today on for the next, I don’t know, two weeks,” for example. Let’s not do this for now and make it simple. Down here, there are some more detailed settings as to how you want to synchronize those posts. It’s similar to settings that you know from Global Content in general. Do you want to include nested content? So if these posts, for example, contain images or forms, do you want to synchronize them as well? In most cases, you want to do that. If you’re synchronizing post types, do you want to include the posts, or only synchronize the post type structure? Do you want to include the terms of the post type? How do you want to handle navigation links? Do you want to resolve those, or do you want to keep those? And if there are translations, do you want to synchronize them as well? Yes or no? You can add several conditions here; of course they should not be conflicting ones, but you can add as many as you like. And then you can save the cluster, and content will automatically be synchronized.

We will now see here in the queue that you can have an overview of all Global Content actions that are running on your website, and we can now see that this is just what we just started now a couple of seconds ago. Now, let’s just go to the Helpcenter site and see whether the posts are already there. Now, let’s check the Helpcenter, go to the posts, and yes, here are all the automatically synchronized posts from my Betting website. We can just check one of them. Yes, here you can see that those posts are automatically synchronized from the Betting website without us having done anything manually, so the cluster managed everything for us automatically.

Okay, and now let’s add reviews to that, because now I don’t want all posts to automatically be synchronized to my Helpcenter website, but I want to check them first to make sure that everything is alright, according to our legal guidelines and whatsoever. So, let’s go back to our cluster and edit it. This is the cluster we built earlier, and now we enable reviews and define who should act as the reviewer. In this case, I’m going to do it myself. You could also add several reviewers here. Now, just saving the cluster. Okay, and if we now create a new post on the Betting Helpcenter, it should not automatically be displayed or synchronized to the Helpcenter here, but a review process should be started before that.

So, let’s check this out and just create a post. So, let’s go to the Betting website—this is this one—and create a test post. This is my test post. I don’t remember which categories were synchronized, so let’s just check all of them and publish the post. Before activating the reviews, this post would now automatically also be synchronized to the Helpcenter. So, let’s check here. As we can see, nothing changed here, because the review process is in between. What you can’t see is my email inbox. I have just received an email as a reviewer informing me that a post is waiting for me to be reviewed. And we can also see this here in the cluster because there’s also an overview of post reviews here. Here we can now see, this is the post we just created here on the Betting Helpcenter. And I can see who created the post and when, and we just have the open reviews. We can also see the approved ones and the rejected ones, and as soon as the reviewer has done something, you can also see who the reviewer is. In this overview, I can now edit the post. So, I can approve them, I can delete them, or if I already have approved one, I can also reverse this here in the overview very easily.

So, let’s just assume I just want to take a look at the post. See, this is a global post with a review pending, and I can now say, “Okay, approve changes,” or I would say, “Can you please change the text, for example?” And you can see I can leave this message for the editor directly here in the WordPress interface and say, “Okay, send it to the editor.” Now, the editor will be informed, again via email and also in the post, you can see, “Okay, this is a global source post in a review, it’s not approved yet.” This is the change request, and you can also see that on the cluster now. So, let’s go back to the cluster, and we can see the state at the moment is “denied” because I’ve made some change requests.

So, the issue now is that I’m both the editor and reviewer, so I can’t really see the changes from the editor side because I’m also the reviewer. But let’s go back here and say, “Let’s assume, okay, the text is now changed,” publish that. Then, I should get again an email to review that. Let’s see, okay, let’s go there. Okay, now I have the new version, and again, I have to review it. I can again request a modification, I can revert the changes as well, or I could approve them, which is what I’m going to do now. I’m now going to approve it. While approving, I will again be informed about the consequences. The consequence is that as soon as I approve this post, it will automatically be synced to this website. So, this is what I’m now going to do. Publish changes, and if we now go back to the Helpcenter site and click here. Now the test post is here, and it’s the version with the change we did here. And again, if we go back to the cluster or the review overview, we can now see… Let’s just update that. Okay, it’s now not any longer in the open ones, but in the approved ones. I can now see here, it’s approved. This is the editor, this is the reviewer, this is the root stage, and I could also say, “Okay, maybe I was too quick to approve that,” let’s revert that, and now it’s back to open, and the state is again in review, and I can also see it here. So, I can always see and understand what’s happening. I have all these actions here in my queue, so I see, “Okay, there’s a post that is scheduled to be synchronized, but it’s not yet synchronized because it’s still in the review process,” for example. And here, in the settings, you can also define what you want to happen to completed reviews. So, the ones that are reverted or approved, how long do you want to have them in the post review, an how often do you want it to be cleaned up and delete the old ones?

Okay, now I’d like to take one more look at the clusters and show you two more things. Let’s just use our test cluster. Just a general note: when you want to synchronize WordPress templates or template parts, so site editor elements, you can also synchronize them, but here you have to be a little bit careful because each block site in WordPress, usually already has these assets. They have a header template part, a footer template part. So, what happens when you synchronize them? Then the destination site, the template parts, they will be overwritten. Sometimes there can be issues with that, so if you want to be 100% sure and also make sure nothing gets overwritten that you don’t want to, then please check the destination first and delete the template parts there, for example, so it’s a lot easier.

And then I’d like to show you another example of what you can do with a cluster. I’m going to create a new one for that. Let’s say this is a “Job Cluster.” What I want to show you is, I have two websites. Now, on both websites, I have the post type “Job,” and I want them to be synchronized in a way that it doesn’t matter if a new job post is added on this website or on the other one. I want them to be available, to be displayed on both websites. So, how do we do that? In that case, I would select both websites as the destination here. So, I don’t know, maybe the Fitness Franchise and the Fitness Franchise 2. Reviews, we don’t need that now. In this case, I now need to define two conditions: one to synchronize the content from the Fitness Franchise 1 to Fitness Franchise 2, and one the other way round. So, just here, we would say the source post is, for once, Fitness Franchise 2, and we want to synchronize jobs. We could narrow that down. We don’t need that now. And we add a second condition, and here we say Fitness Franchise 1 is the source, again, job post type, etc.

So, you see, there’s a lot you can do, and those cluster and review features enable you to really streamline the entire Global Content automation process.

For more videos and information, please visit our Helpcenter.