Content Staging Explained: A Comparative Study of TYPO3 and Other CMSs

Content staging could be described as the dress rehearsal stage of web content management. It’s the process of editing, tweaking, and previewing content before it’s published on your live (production) website. This staged version of your content replicates your website in form and function, but with one vital difference—it’s not available publicly. Only your team members can access the staging area, providing them with a safe space to make changes, fix issues, and test the functionality of the content without any real-time impact on your live site.

Whether you’re planning to publish a series of blog posts or designing a brand new landing page, the staging area is your playground. It’s the space where you can experiment, adjust and optimize, observing how everything comes together without the eyes of your users on it. Like a dress rehearsal, it ensures that the final live performance is seamless, error-free, and delivers the best possible experience to your audience.

Content staging offers numerous benefits, including:

• Quality assurance: Content staging allows your team to meticulously review the changes, ensuring that all elements are functioning as expected, free from errors, and aesthetically pleasing.
• Consistency: Staging enables you to maintain a consistent look and feel across your site. This is especially important if multiple team members are involved in content creation and management.
• Risk mitigation: With a staging environment, changes made do not immediately affect your live site. This provides a safety net, allowing you to revert or fix things if something goes awry.
• Collaboration: The staging area allows multiple team members to work on the same piece of content simultaneously, promoting collaboration and collective editing.

Most content staging UIs are good enough for a personal blog or website, but get more challenging when you’re deploying a change across multiple sites or languages. For example, you might work for a multinational company that needs to announce a new product launch across different regions and languages at the same time. This requires a lot of coordination across different reviewers, and testing different types of content at once!

For more complicated websites, a CMS should support a broad set of features out of the box. Content editors need a clear process for drafting, editing, reviewing, scheduling, and publishing written and visual content—often in multilingual or multi-site environments. This content development workflow is how your team takes a piece of content from initial conception to publishing. Your content staging workflow should clearly demarcate each step, including:

• Editing and creating content
• Reviewing different versions of content (version control)
• Previewing near-final content and testing for functionality
• Approving posts and pages
• Scheduling posts

This workflow needs to be backed up by key features within your CMS software, such as:

• Viewing the live website (final product) 
  At b13 we draft most of our initial blog posts (including this one!) in a Google Doc. We only move it to the content staging area when the piece is ready to go. That’s where we add images, live links, and any last-minute edits before testing and publishing. It’s crucial that you can get an accurate preview of the final site to get an accurate view of what the customer experience is like.
• Configurable user roles, responsibilities, and permissions 
  Different members of your team should have different levels of access to content staging. Your content editor might want full edit access but be restricted from changing technical settings (and vice versa for your developers). You might want to block new team members from accessing content they could accidentally change, or clients from early drafts so they don’t see the mess until it gets cleaned up!
• An indicator of your workflow stage
  Staging is not just about having a binary “draft” and “live” state. CMSs should have these states by default, but should allow you to create other states that are available to varying degrees internally and externally. Your CMS should have a clear visual indicator in the UI so that editors know the state of the site they’re working on.
• A customizable publishing workflow
  As a piece of content moves through the publishing workflow, you should be able to see where in the publishing process it lies. For each stage of the workflow, users might have different permissions and page settings. In an “editing” state, for example, you should be able to make changes to your text, but in a “ready to publish” state, your content should be locked down.

Now that you’ve seen what content staging should do, let’s get into how different CMSs have built theirs.

Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms. It is proprietary software with a subscription-based pricing model that varies based on the specific needs and scale of your organization.

One of AEM’s key offerings is its robust content staging capabilities. The system gives businesses the ability to create, preview, and schedule a wide range of content updates directly from the admin dashboard. Instead of viewing a page as static, AEM allows you to treat a page as a dynamic collection of elements that can be toggled on or off based on a schedule, automating content changes throughout the year.

Here’s what AEM offers in terms of key content staging requirements:

• Version control: AEM’s content staging allows for the creation of multiple versions of the same content, to be used for future updates. It also provides the ability to step back through the timeline to view previous versions of the content.
• Previews: Users can preview and share changes by date, time, or store view, providing a clear view of how the content will appear when live.
• Scheduling posts: Content changes can be scheduled for specific time periods. When the scheduled time expires, the content reverts to the previous version, thereby ensuring a seamless transition between different content versions.
• Roles and permissions: AEM’s content staging supports various roles and permissions, enabling collaborative editing and approval workflows.
• Different staging states: AEM refers to the records of scheduled changes as “campaigns.” These campaigns can be viewed on a calendar or timeline and managed from the Staging Dashboard.
• Workflow: AEM supports a detailed workflow for content staging, where baseline content is created, followed by creating and scheduling campaigns with start and end dates. The baseline content is always used, unless there is an active campaign with changes scheduled.

In addition to these features, AEM’s Content Staging dashboard provides visibility into all planned site changes and updates, which can be previewed and shared with others.

Despite its powerful features, AEM may not be suitable for everyone. Being a premium solution, AEM’s pricing could be a deterrent for small to medium-sized businesses or those with tight budget constraints. Furthermore, because it’s not open-source, it lacks the flexibility and community support available with open-source CMSs like TYPO3—while AEM does have the capacity for integrations, depending on the other technologies used in your stack, you might need specialized knowledge or additional resources to establish seamless integrations.

HubSpot is a popular marketing, sales, customer service, and CRM platform that businesses use to attract and engage customers. It is proprietary software that operates on a subscription model. Content staging is available with any of the HubSpot CMS Hub Professional and Enterprise subscriptions.

HubSpot’s content staging tool allows you to redesign and relaunch your website and landing pages in a staging environment. This includes redesigning and replacing existing HubSpot-hosted pages, or creating new pages from scratch. The content created and published in content staging is hosted on a sandbox subdomain, allowing you to make major changes and updates to your site without impacting the live version.

Here’s what HubSpotoffers in terms of key content staging requirements:

• Version control: HubSpot provides a version control feature that tracks changes made to any page template, global content, or database table in content staging. This enables you to revert to a previous version of your content if necessary.
• Previews: Before making your changes live, you can preview the updated design and content on your-domain.sandbox.hs-sites.com. This ensures that everything looks and functions as expected before replacing the live pages.
• Scheduling content: HubSpot has extensive post-scheduling functionality.
• Roles and permissions: HubSpot offers robust user roles and permissions, ensuring that only authorized users can access and make changes to the staging environment.
• Workflow: The workflow in HubSpot’s content staging tool involves creating or cloning pages in the staging environment, making desired changes, publishing to the staging domain for review, and then replacing live pages when ready. The staged pages can either be clones of existing pages, blank pages replacing existing pages, or completely new pages. The workflow also includes the ability to change your website’s domain and take your staged site live. You can choose to replace the live URLs of your site or host your new website on a new domain.

In spite of the many benefits of HubSpot’s content staging tool, there are a few limitations:

• The content staging tool doesn’t currently support multi-language content.
• It can’t be used to redesign blog pages. Instead, you must replace your blog’s template in your settings—adding a number of additional steps to the process of previewing visual changes.
• Changes made to any page template, global content, or database table in content staging will be reflected on live pages using those assets, meaning changes can affect the live site if not handled correctly—templates should be cloned first.
• If you disconnect a subdomain from HubSpot, any pages staged on that subdomain will no longer be accessible.

As with AEM, Hubspot’s subscription pricing model can be a potential downside for small businesses or individuals with a limited budget, and its closed-source nature means that it can potentially be less flexible and open for integrations than open-source solutions like TYPO3.

TYPO3 is an open-source content management system that offers robust features for creating, managing, and extending websites and web applications. It’s highly flexible, scalable, and designed to meet complex enterprise-level needs, with extensive multilingual support and the ability to run multiple sites from a single installation.

Content staging in TYPO3 is handled by the Workspaces component, which comes out-of-the-box with TYPO3. In Workspaces, you can edit content, test changes, hand content over for others‘ approval, and preview the near-final product before launching new content to the production site.

Here’s what TYPO3 offers in terms of core content staging functionality:

• Version control: “At its core, Workspaces handle ‘versioned content’—an alternative version of a database record created, deleted, or modified in a workspace,” says Benni Mack, CTO at b13. When you’re working in a draft workspace, there are two versions of your website: the one that’s being tested, and the one accessible to the public. Whenever you publish edits to a page, that page automatically becomes the version accessible to the public. Any in-progress draft edits across other workspaces will be made against the newly published page.
• Previews: Workspaces give editors the ability to generate special “preview” links, which they can send to anyone who needs to review the website. You can generate them for a page within a workspace so that after a user visits that page, they can review separate changes to other pages within the same workspace.
• Scheduling posts: When a post or page is ready for publication, editors can schedule both the publish date and, optionally, an expiration date. This means the content won’t be publicly available until the publish date, and it will become unavailable upon the expiration date—if you set it. Editors can also control who has access to the page once published.
• Roles and permissions: Roles and permissions in TYPO3 can be set for various workspaces. We recommend distributing permissions according to your backend user groups, each of which can be assigned to one of the following categories:
  • Owners: All possible permissions.
  • Members: All possible permissions, except the ability to publish (in some cases).
  • Editors: Ability to create or modify content.
  • Responsible parties: A restricted set of Owners and Members that require notification.
• Different staging states: In TYPO3, you can define an unlimited number of “states” for your content. The basics are “live” and “draft” but you can also create specific configurations for each page on your website. Your news page might have a “Draft News” configuration that gives a news or blog editor access they might not have for other pages. If you’re running a campaign, you might want to have a workspace specific to an event—like a “Draft Black Friday” workspace that is scheduled to go live at midnight on Black Friday and replace certain pages of your website, and then snap back to the content that existed the day before.
• Workflow: You can define your content development workflow by applying different settings to each stage. By default, your workflow will contain three stages:
  • Editing
  • Ready to publish
  • Published
  Additional stages can be added to adjust for your team’s workflow, depending on what’s needed for that particular workspace. For example, you might want to add a stage for “Translation,” “Approval,” or “Layout-Specific Editing”, depending on who’s collaborating. 

Want to learn more? Read our introduction to using and setting up Workspaces for your website.

TYPO3 stands out as an open-source, affordable solution with enterprise-level functionality that rivals proprietary platforms in its capabilities. With its Workspaces feature, TYPO3 excels particularly in content staging, even presenting a competitive edge over costlier options like Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) and Hubspot.

Here’s how TYPO3 compares to AEM and Hubspot in key areas of content staging functionality:

• Version control: In TYPO3’s Workspaces, version control handles “versioned content.” Whenever an edit is made in a draft workspace, an alternative version of that page is created. This allows editors to work on different versions of a page concurrently without interfering with the live, public-facing version. When changes are published, the live version gets updated, and any ongoing edits will be made against this newly updated version. AEM and Hubspot also offer version history, but not necessarily with the same degree of flexibility and intuitiveness as TYPO3.
• Previews: TYPO3 allows preview links for content reviewers, ensuring changes can be viewed without backend access. AEM offers a similar feature. Hubspot’s CMS preview feature is less flexible and requires login.
• Scheduling content: TYPO3 lets you schedule the publish date and optionally, an expiration date. AEM also supports scheduling, but requires more steps than TYPO3, owing to its “campaign” structure. Hubspot offers content scheduling, but lacks an expiration date feature.
• Roles and permissions: All CMSs offer tools for assigning permissions to different user groups.
• Different staging states: TYPO3 supports an unlimited number of content states, like “live,” “draft,” or campaign-specific configurations. AEM also provides content states, and Hubspot only offers “draft” and “live” states.
• Workflow: TYPO3 allows custom workflow stages based on team needs. AEM and Hubspot offer similar functionality.

Content staging is a critical feature in modern content management systems, enabling seamless and error-free content updates. By allowing the creation and testing of multiple versions of content in isolation, content staging helps to avoid disruptions on live websites, maintain brand integrity, and ensure top-notch user experiences.

Among the CMSs discussed here, TYPO3’s Workspaces stands out with its sophisticated yet intuitive features. It offers robust version control, previews, content scheduling, granular roles and permissions, customizable states, and adaptable workflows. Particularly notable is its ability to offer preview links to users who don’t have backend access.

Being an open-source platform, TYPO3 brings the added advantages of cost-effectiveness and flexibility. Despite being free to use, TYPO3 competes favorably with—and even exceeds—the capabilities of enterprise solutions when it comes to content staging.

If you’re considering a CMS with top-tier content staging capabilities that doesn’t break the bank, TYPO3 is a worthy candidate. As experts in TYPO3, b13 can help you get set up, guiding you to leverage the full potential of this formidable CMS. Reach out to us today and let’s raise your content management game.

The purpose of staging is to create a replica of a live website to test, preview, and validate changes before they’re made public.

Content staging involves preparing, reviewing, and testing website content in a draft environment before it goes live.

Key elements of staging include an isolated environment, version control, content previews, scheduling, and workflow management.

Staging and integration involve testing individual components together in a staging environment to ensure they function as expected when combined.

No, staging is a testing phase for overall functionality and appearance, while integration involves combining individual components to ensure they work together properly.

While both involve checks for errors, staging involves testing the overall functionality and look of a website, while testing often focuses on individual components or features.

A staging website is a replica for testing changes before they go live, while a production website is a live site that users interact with.