An introduction to cross-site publishing

To build our Contoso website, we'll be using cross-site publishing, a new publishing method that's just been introduced with SharePoint Server 2013. Before we start however, let's get a bit more familiar with how cross-site publishing works.
Note: most of features described in this series are not available in SharePoint 2013 online.

What is cross-site publishing?
Cross-site publishing's a publishing method. It lets you create and maintain content in one or moreauthoring site collections, and publish this content across one or more publishing site collections, by using Search Web Parts.

When should you use cross-site publishing?
Use cross-site publishing when you want to store and maintain content in one or more authoring site collections and display this content in one or more publishing site collections. Cross-site publishing will make life easy for you as it:

• Can be used across site collections, web applications, and even across farms.
• Separates content authoring from branding and rendering, meaning how you author content has nothing to do with how it is displayed to users.
• Allows you to mix pages and catalog content.

How does cross-site publishing work?
Cross-site publishing uses search technology to retrieve content. Here's how it works in four simple steps:

1. You create content in libraries and lists in a site collection where cross-site publishing is enabled. You enable these libraries and lists as catalogs.
2. You crawl the content in your catalog-enabled libraries and lists. This will add the catalog content to the search index.
3. You add one or more Search Web Parts to the site collections where you want to display your catalog content.
4. When users view a page, the Search Web Parts issue queries to the search index. Query results are returned from the search index, and shown in the Search Web Parts.

When you decide to change content in an authoring site collection, the changes you make are shown across all publishing site collections that are using that same content.

Create site collections for cross-site publishing

 This is a blog post in the series “How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013”.  In this series, I'll use data from a fictitious company called "Contoso" to show you how to use search features to set up a website based on product catalog data.

Note: most of features described in this series are not available in SharePoint 2013 online.

For an overview of the blog posts in this series, go to How to set up a product-centric website in SharePoint Server 2013.

Start stage 1

When you use cross-site publishing, you use one or more authoring site collections to author and store content, and one or more publishing site collections to show this content.

In our scenario, we'll start by creating a Product Catalog Site Collection. We'll use this site collection to author and store information about the products that Contoso offer, for example, info about the MP3 player "Litware 2G E200", or the Laptop "Adventure Works 15.4W".

Along with this, we'll be creating a Publishing Portal Site Collection. We'll use this site collection to display product info about "Litware 2G E200", "Adventure Works 15.4W" and all the other products that Contoso offer.

Remember though, visitors browsing the Contoso website, which is the publishing portal, will NOT be able to view content in the product catalog! Visitors will only get to see content that has been added to the search index from the product catalog. When visitors browse the Contoso website, search technology displays content from the search index.

So, in the simplest of terms, our architecture will look like this:

Bear with me if this is a bit tricky to follow. I'll soon be using real examples, and it'll all become a lot clearer. But first things first: let's create the site collections.

To create a Product Catalog Site Collection, here's what you should do: Go to Central Administration --> Create site collections, and then enter details for the site collection. Here's what you need to enter:

1. A title for the website.
2. The website's URL.
3. Select 2013 for the experience version.
4. From the Publishing tab, select the Product Catalog template.
5. In the field Primary Site Collection Site Administrator, enter the site admin's user name.

Take a look at the screen capture below for some more guidance. 

Now, to create a Publishing Portal Site Collection, repeat the steps above, but with one difference, from the Publishing tab, choose Publishing Portal. The title of this site collection is Contoso.

 

Now that we've our site collections, it's time to start adding content.