Publishing
From Gestaltipedia
The way Gestalt handles whether the latest version of an article is visible to the public is through its publishing mechanism.
Much in the same way that a document would be published on paper, edits made to an article in Gestalt can be published to the public website. In earlier versions of Gestalt, this was known as "refreshing the cache". In either case, the process that happens behind the scenes involves creating a fresh combination of data from the website's database as seen through a specific page template. Each time a page is published, a new version of that mixture of form and content is saved to a file on the hard drive of the Web server.
The publishing system serves two different purposes through this process:
Firstly, it creates a mechanism by which changes can be reviewed by site administrators before that material is presented to the public. In the default configuration of the gestalt system, this is not a feature that is enabled. However, with small adjustments to privileges for some users, it would be a simple matter to use the Editing Activity Monitor to watch what articles have been changed and then allow those changes to be shown were not.
The other purpose of the publishing system is to improve the performance of the Web server under high-traffic situations. The classic problem with websites that use databases and templates is the extreme computational cost in serving up dynamic content. This is because for each request, traditionally, multiple requests from the database have to be processed, organized into relevant chunks, and placed into whatever page template system the developer has come up with. And, while this works in theory, in practice it creates a tremendous waste of resources as the same things are done millions of times where (had the first request simply been stored in a static document,) the resources of the Web application server could have been more efficiently utilized.
Forcing a page to republish
Normally, you can republish a page by clicking the "publish" button in your toolkit menu or an article editor. However, you can also force a page to republish itself by adding the term "&cache_refresh=1" to the end of any URL in the site. This will cause the pending version of the article in the database to come the published version, as well as refreshing and a configuration concerning default templates and other variables associated with the formatting of the page.
In future versions of the publishing system, this refresh shortcut will be tied to specific user privileges. At the moment it is not and is only protected by the obscurity and difficulty of manually typing in the term at the URL. In sites which do not restrict their contributors from publishing pages, this is not a huge issue.
Re-Publishing the entire site
(here we will discuss how to do this)
