This blog post provides perspective on the term publish as it is used in content management systems, specifically the Contentstack SaaS Headless CMS. This post is a member of the following glossary:
Publishing refers to making data from a content management system available to a content delivery system.
CMS users manage published and unpublished versions of entries in the content management repository. Content delivery systems retrieve data from separate content delivery facilities in the CMS. To make data available to content delivery systems, the content management system must publish versions of entries from the content management repository to a content delivery facility, which may be part of the CMS or a separate system.
Typically, CMS users can publish data manually, on one or more schedules, and using CMS workflow, while developers can use webhooks (CMS events) and APIs.
Depending on the CMS, four or more types of data may require publication.
- Content type definitions
- Entries based on content types
- Media assets binaries
- Media asset metadata
- Others
Publishing may be transactional. Publishing is often sequential, in which case the order of publishing operations may impact downstream systems.
In Contentstack and many other CMS, content delivery facilities are called environments.
Deliverystack.net 
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