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How Variant Sites Work

A Variant Site is based on an existing iAPPS site (the Master Site. Users can import pages from a Master site (your main iAPPS site) to a variant. They can easily share assets without additional setup and can use the same workflow process.

• While there are many uses for variants of an existing site, the most common use will be a language variant. iAPPS will help users manage content across all your site, interface with third-party translation services, and set up workflows to ensure content is checked before publication across multiple sites.

Variant sites can be set up to work in various ways. Below is a possible scheme.

How are Variant Sites Managed?

Start with a Master Site. For sample purposes, this might be an US English site.

1. Create Variant site(s). For example, this might include a French Canadian site.
2. Options include copying the existing US menu structure with all the pages or just the menus, or neither.
   1. If the entire site and menu structure are copied, the security levels come with it.
   2. Sharing website users and groups between variant sites is also possible if chosen as an option when setting up a variant site.
   3. If no menus or pages, nor any content library pages are imported then the Asset Libraries will be completely separate. Display Libraries such as Styles and Templates will always be shared. If you need different templates than you should use multi-site.
3. In variant sites, authors and editors can rename pages and menu items, change content, and add their own menu items, pages and site assets. New Asset libraries will be created, but assets can be shared from the Master Site.
   1. If pages are copied, new page IDs are created, but initially all content on the variant pages still points to the Master Site content (with the same content IDs).
   2. Once content is edited, it will be given a new content ID, but is still related back to the original content container from the Master Site.
   3. Content definitions are shared, but can use different XSLT formatting for each variant.
   4. Content definitions, links, and lists may need to be changed manually.
4. After the Variant Site is created, the any Menus and Pages copied from the Master Site can be sent to iAPPS built-in Translation process by Menu node, or page by page. Content can also be translated manually by pasting in the translated version into a text container.
5. After the initial creation of the Variant site, notifications can be set up to alert users of any changes to Master Site Content after that point.
   1. When they received notifications, Administrators for the Variant site(s) can either re-import the page, edit existing content as desired or ignore the update. If they re-import the page any changes on the Variant page will be overwritten.
   2. The Master Site content can be sent to Translation from the Master Site or sent from the Variant site once the page has been pulled onto the Variant Site.

Note: if the entire menu structure is copied when a Variant Site is setup, the security levels and existing user groups will also be copied (not shared) to the Variant Site. Permissions for the users will not be shared, so if group permissions are changed in a variant site or users are added to the group, it will not affect the Master Site or vice versa.