Content Distribution/Publishing in Tridion 2009
Content Distribution (or Publishing) is a process of taking content out of Content Manager and presenting it to Presentation Server(1). As described in the above diagram, there are some processes involved in content distributions.
In Tridion, an item can be published either through manual process (user) or automated process (workflow). If any item gets published, Publisher sends that item to transport service. Then transport service assembles the published item with its associated items (component presentation and pages), into a transportation package. Transportation package is nothing but a zip file containing xml files. Sender in Transportation Service sends the package to one or many destinations, using specific protocols(2). Receiver in the Deployer side, receives the package using the same protocols as Sender. Deployer unpacks the transportation package and process all the items according to the transportation instructions included with the package. It either transmits to Broker or any other custom actions (In my project, packages will be sent to file system). Broker will process an item and will be stored in a DataStore(3), as configured.
(1) Presentation Server – It could be of any .Net/JAVA web and application server (such as IIS or Tomcat).
(2) Protocols – It could be any of, File System, HTTP, HTTPS, FTP or custom protocol.
(3) DataStore – It could be of either File System (or) Database (DB2, SQL Server or Oracle).
