To help you develop and maintain your production websites, you can create site collections, which bundle and organize related websites.
A site collection contains a primary website (to which you can associate a custom domain name) and one or more secondary websites. Site visitors can view the primary website in a site collection using one of the following URLs:
The website’s Site Factory URL
The site collection’s URL
One of the custom domain URLs associated with the site collection
For example, you have a production website that describes a product, but you also have a staging website that contains the theme and content changes that you’re currently developing. Having both of these websites in a site collection, you can associate the current production website with a custom domain URL. When the staging website is complete, you can swap the websites, making the staging website the production website with the custom domain URL (without having to contact your domain name registrar regarding the website change).
Note
Only user accounts with the platform admin or site builder role can create or manage site collections.
The websites contained by a site collection are completely separate from one another and do not have any common workflow capabilities (development, staging, production).
You can duplicate a production website to create a secondary development website in the site collection, and then later promote it to the primary website. (Note that the new primary website doesn’t contain databases or user-created items created after you duplicated the website.)
Creating a site collection
To create a new site collection:
Sign in to the Site Factory Management Console.
Select the site group that you want to contain the new site collection.
Note
You can create site collections only inside of site groups.
Click the arrow to the right of Create a new site to open its menu.
Click New site collection.
In the Site collection name field, enter a descriptive name for the site collection to display in the Site Factory Management Console (for example,
Product site).In the Internal URL field, enter the Site Factory site collection name to use with its URL (for example,
prodsite). The Site Factory base URL is added to this name.Click Continue.
In the Site name field, enter the sitename for one of your websites. Site Factory displays websites that match your entry as you type. As you add websites to the site collection, the page displays additional site name fields to allow you to add multiple websites.
If you want to add additional websites to the site collection as secondary websites, enter them in the additional site name fields.
Click Finish.
Using the site collection interface
After you create a site collection, the Site Factory Management Console displays a detail page that you can use to manage the collection.
Site collection URL
Number of websites in the site collection
Methods to add or remove custom URLs associated with the site collection
Primary website management
Secondary websites in the site collection
Groups that contain this site collection
Managing secondary sites
After you’ve created a site collection, you can add or remove secondary websites to the collection.
Adding sites
To add a website to a site collection as a secondary website:
Go to the site collection detail page.
In the Secondary sites in this collection section, click Add.
In an empty Site name field, enter the sitename for one of your websites that you want to add to the collection. Site Factory displays websites that match your entry as you type.
Click Finish.
Note
A website can be a secondary website for only a single site collection.
Removing sites
To remove a secondary website from a site collection:
Go to the site collection detail page.
In the Secondary sites in this collection section, find the website that you want to remove from the site collection.
Click the website’s minus button.
To confirm the website’s removal from the site collection, click Confirm.
The website is no longer in the site collection and is moved back to the group or subgroup that contains the site collection. If the website is removed from a site collection that is not a member of any group or subgroup, the website is listed only on the All my sites page.
Setting a new primary site
To make a secondary website the primary website for a site collection (which associates the site collection’s URL and any of its custom domain names with the new primary website):
Go to the site collection detail page.
In the Secondary sites in this collection section, find the website that you want to set as the new primary website.
Click the website’s Make primary button.
Controlling access to this feature
By default, users with the platform admin and site builder roles can promote secondary websites to the primary website for a site collection. If you want to limit the users who can complete this action to only platform admins, use the following steps:
Sign in to the Site Factory Management Console as a user with the platform admin role.
In the admin menu, click Administration, and then click the Manage permissions link.
Select the roles that you want to be able to promote a secondary website.
Click Save.
Assigning custom domain names
You can associate one or more custom domain names with each of your site collections, and each custom domain displays the current primary website with the associated site collection. This allows you to change your primary website (for example, you’re making a development website the new production website) without having to contact your domain name registrar.
Note
If your primary website uses the External Links module, validate your website’s external links pattern matching to ensure that it’s configured to handle new custom domains.
Associating custom domains
For information about associating custom domain names with your site collections, see Adding custom domains to your site.
Removing custom domains
To remove a custom domain from a site collection:
Go to the site collection detail page.
Click Manage collection domains.
In the Domains belonging to this collection section, find the domain name that you want to remove.
Click the domain name’s minus icon.
To confirm the removal, click Delete.
Deleting a site collection
To delete a site collection:
Sign in to the Site Factory Management Console as a user account with the platform admin role.
Find the site collection that you want to delete on the All my sites page, the All my groups page, or in a group that contains the site collection, and then open its actions menu.
Click Delete collection.
To confirm that you want to delete the site collection, click Delete.
Site Factory deletes the site collection, but not the websites that it contained. You can find websites from deleted site collections on the All my sites page, because these websites do not belong to any group.
Note
If you delete a site collection, you cannot reuse its name for a site collection in the same Site Factory subscription.