What is Site Factory?
Site Factory is the site management space where SiteFarm sites are created and hosted. It is an administrative space only; actual work on adding content and configuring the look and feel is done within the specific SiteFarm instance.
Who is Site Factory for?
It's for organizations with more than two or three sites who would like to:
- create a centralized administrative group responsible for overseeing a group of department sites
- create a master template from which all new SiteFarm sites will be cloned
- have an administrative interface for bulk changes such as themes or development staging
What does it mean to use Site Factory?
If your organization decides to use Site Factory it is with the understanding that you now have complete autonomous control over the creation, organization, and administration of your sites, including when they should go live. It means that if people have support questions, you will be their first point of contact. You will decide who the core members are of your Site Factory administrative group, and these group members will be added to a Client Group List people can search to see if they must speak to you first to requisition a site instead of going through the SiteFarm Team.
Do I have to use Site Factory?
Absolutely not. This is an added feature available through our Acquia Cloud service and will only be instigated at the request of an organization. It will not be the default service model; you can choose to manage your sites through each site's SiteFarm administrative interface and rely on the SiteFarm team to assist you with your site launch when you're ready to go live.
Who should be on my department's Site Factory admin team?
Ideally, the people involved in the admin team will be comfortable with technology. To draw a comparison, if you're comfortable learning how to use your smartphone, you'll be fine with Site Factory. The biggest challenge is simply learning where the features are located; the actual steps to accomplishing the tasks is straightforward and covered in the additional documentation in this section. Pick two to five people to manage your administrative group in Site Factory depending on the number of sites you're managing and level of support you believe your users will need.
From a larger organization's perspective, this may involve discussion with an IT department, a dean's office, or whichever group is in charge of individual websites or the entire organization's web presence to determine which people should have this authority.
But I'm not sure I'm ready to provide technical support!
We recommend a strong comfort level with using the basic elements of SiteFarm before venturing into Site Factory.
If creating a cohesive master site template is key to creating and rolling out the other sites that will depend on that template, start with a single site to build your template, notify the SiteFarm team you would like it cloned and then use the clone to begin building a real site.
We have our team--now what?
- Does your team have the organization's authorization to act as the admin group?
- Are you prepared to be your users' first point of contact for questions and support?
- Do you feel comfortable with the steps outlined in the rest of the Site Factory documentation?
If you've answered "Yes" to all of the above, complete the Request access to Site Factory form to start the process.