Create a Release for Your Enablement Site

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe what a release is.
  
• Describe the actions that are possible at the different release statuses.
  

Get Ready to Publish Your Content

When your company is ready to make content available to learners on your enablement site, a release manager publishes content in a release. In this module, you take a look at a release manager’s workflow.

To learn more about previous steps of the enablement site development cycle, check out the Enablement Site Basics, Enablement Site Configuration, Writing for an Enablement Site, and Trailmaker Content Basics modules.

Let’s check in again with the Pure Aloe company, which produces and sells moisturizers and creams made from aloe vera. Cindy, the content creator, has written content that’s intended for the Pure Aloe Sales team. Marisol, the release manager, oversees the company’s enablement site publishing flow. Marisol and Cindy work together to add content to a release, but it’s Marisol’s responsibility as release manager to make sure that a release is ready to go.

A release contains the list of modules and trails that you publish at one time for a particular content collection. In a release, you can:

• Publish new content.
  
• Update existing content.
  
• Archive published content.
  
• Restore archived content.
  

Releases control all the publishing activity on your enablement site. If a module or a trail isn’t listed in a release, it can’t be published. You can maintain separate releases for each content collection so that you can independently deliver updates for each learning audience. 

You can't follow these steps in a Trailhead Playground, because enablement sites aren't available in Trailhead Playgrounds. 

Create a Release

Cindy’s content is intended for the Sales team, so Marisol knows that she wants to create a release in the content collection that the Sales team can access. Back in the Enablement Site Configuration module, you saw how the Salesforce admin at Pure Aloe, Joseph, created the Sales Team content collection. That’s where Marisol plans to create this release. Here’s how she does it.

1. Log in to the enablement site for Pure Aloe, click the avatar in the upper right, and select Trailmaker.
   
2. In Trailmaker, click the Releases tab.
   
3. From the Content Collection dropdown, select the Sales Team content collection.
   
   
4. In the Unpublished Releases section of the content collection page, click New Release.
   
   
5. Enter the name of the release.
   
6. Enter a unique API name for the release. This is a programmatic name that learners won’t see. Trailmaker Release generates a unique API name based on the title, and you can accept the suggested name or change it.
   
7. Click Create.
   
   

Change the Release Status

A release can be Published or Unpublished. A release manager can leave an unpublished release open, so that permitted users can add, delete, or modify content for a release. When it’s time to prepare a release for publication, a release manager can lock an unpublished release so that collaborators can no longer modify the items in the release. 

Here’s how each status affects what permitted users can do in a release. 

After a release is published, its status permanently changes to Published. To update published content, a release manager creates another release, and collaborates with a writer to add the updated content to the new release.

For now, Marisol leaves this unpublished release in the Open status. She still hasn’t added any items to her release! In the next unit, you learn how Marisol uses Trailmaker Release to add the trails or modules that she wants to publish.

Resources

• Trailhead: Trailmaker Content Basics
  
• Salesforce Help: Manage Releases with the Trailmaker Release App
  
• Salesforce Help: API Names for Trails, Modules, and Units
  
• Salesforce Help: Change the Status of an Unpublished Release