This list covers the most common things we encounter when people contact us to launch their sites. For a full list of pre-launch considerations, please consult https://webcommunity.sites.uiowa.edu/strategy/launch-checklist

Site Name and Email

Each site is required to set a real site-wide email address and a name that is different from the URL. This can be done by clicking Configuration > Basic Site Settings from the administrative navigation.

Unpublish or Delete Demo Content

When you visit the Content Overview page on a newly provisioned v3 site, you'll see the following content:

Content overview page showing demo content on a newly provisioned SiteNow v3 site

This content is provided as a reference but should not be published when the site is launched. It is enough to un-publish it, but it is also okay to delete it if you are done using it as a reference. The exception to this is the "Home" page. SiteNow v3 requires a page to be registered as your home page and default "Home" page is registered that way. The easiest thing to do is to use the demo "Home" page as the starting point for your site's homepage. If you want to start from scratch, you can do this by visiting the "Layout" tab from the "Home" page (or by clicking "Layout" in the drop-button list under "Operations" in the Content Overview). On the "Layout" screen, click the "Revert to Defaults" button to discard the demo layout and start with a fresh version of the page.

Fix prod.drupal Links

Sometimes people forget about using the built-in linking tools and instead just copy and paste links. The issue with these copied/pasted links is that they likely contain the full URL of the site, which is not the final production URL when the site is launched. This means that when the site is launched, any link like that is immediately broken upon the domain being updated to its final production URL. To find and fix these types of links, you can use the Find Text tool. Click "Find Text" in the administrative navigation and enter prod.drupal into the "Search Text" field and click the "Search" button. You'll see a list of instances where a link was found to contain prod.drupal. All of these links will need to be fixed before they can be launched.

Contact Us to Launch Your Site

Once you have completed the above steps, your site should be ready to launch. You can contact us by responding to one of the automated emails you may have received about your site or directly at its-web@uiowa.edu.