Agencies and Collaboration

To minimise disruptions and improve oversight of external agencies, feature website projects must be implemented on Staging first.

Staging environment requirements

• Staging environment for used agency work must mirror Live site, including all content, plugins, themes, and configurations;
• Staging environment must be periodically refreshed to incorporate any changes made to the live sit;
• Staging refresh should be a manual process happening at least once a month, sufficient warning must be given to an external agency by Claromentis team to avoid any disruptions;
• Staging should not be used for experiments or testing unrelated to work performed by an external agency. Internal changes must be implemented on another Staging environment;
• Staging environment must not be indexed by search engines.

Permissions

External agencies must have the following permissions

Process for publishing changes

Initial work

1. All feature website projects and changes by external agencies must be first performed by them on Staging;
2. Any changes made on staging by external agencies must be communicated to all relevant team members by email to the webteam;
3. Any bugs, errors, or issues identified during testing on the Staging environment must be resolved by external agencies or Claromentis team members before moving to the live site;
4. Any feedback by Claromentis team must be implemented and tested on the staging environment before being moved to the Live site.

Testing and approval

1. Before moving to Live, all work must be thoroughly tested in accordance with an internal process;
2. Only approved and finalised work should be moved to the live site.

Moving to Live

1. In order to move to Live an agency must migrate changes on Live and notify all relevant team members by email to the webteam;
2. Any staging-specific functionality that should not be moved to the live site should be clearly identified and removed or updated before deployment (for example if a Staging version of a form is used, it must be replaced with a version for Live);
3. Once work is moved to the Live site, it should undergo further testing to ensure it functions correctly in the live environment;
4. Once ready, Claromentis team member must publish the work.