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Go-Live Process for CMS Integrations

The go-live process for CMS integrations (WordPress and Drupal) involves transitioning from your existing CMS-hosted site to Quant’s static delivery while maintaining your editorial workflow. This process ensures seamless public site performance while preserving content management capabilities.

Overview

When integrating WordPress or Drupal with Quant, you’ll serve static content to public visitors while maintaining access to your CMS for content authoring and administration. This hybrid approach provides the performance benefits of static delivery with the editorial convenience of your familiar CMS.

Go-Live Steps

Assuming you have already created a project and configured your CMS integration:

  1. Verify Domain Configuration: Ensure the domains attached to your project are correct
  2. Test Preview Domain: Validate and test your website contains all content as expected on the preview domain
  3. Configure DNS: Visit the “Domains” section of the dashboard and follow the DNS record instructions provided
  4. Verify DNS Propagation: Refresh the “Domains” section and confirm the “DNS engaged” value. This may take a few minutes depending on your DNS TTL value
  5. SSL Certificate Validation: Check your website and confirm everything is working as expected. If you receive an SSL error you may click the “Renew” button next to the domain from Quant Dashboard, otherwise it will automatically generate periodically

:::tip Need Help? If you are unsure about DNS values, where to change, or generally need support with the go-live process please contact support via your Quant Dashboard. :::

Maintaining CMS Access

Once you have moved public traffic to Quant, you need to maintain access to your WordPress or Drupal site for ongoing content authoring and administration. There are two primary approaches:

Option 1: Proxy Authenticated Users

:::info Organization Plan Feature This approach requires using the “Rules” feature, which is available on all organization-level plans. :::

This configuration allows you to continue managing your CMS content on your primary/production domain by proxying any authenticated traffic (logged-in site editors) through to your origin server, while serving from the Quant static store for all other users.

WordPress Configuration

  1. Navigate to the “Rules” section of the Quant Dashboard
  2. Create a new rule for any/all relevant domains with a URL match of /wp-login*
  3. Perform a standard “Proxy” action pointing to your webserver
  4. Ensure the “Cache lifetime” is set to 0 to prevent caching the login route
  5. Save the rule
  6. Create another new rule for any/all relevant domains with a URL match of *
  7. Perform a standard “Proxy” action pointing to your webserver
  8. This time, tick the “Only with cookie” option and provide wordpress_logged_in_* as the cookie name
  9. Save the rule. You should be able to login at /wp-login.php and update content normally

Drupal Configuration

  1. Navigate to the “Rules” section of the Quant Dashboard
  2. Create a new rule for any/all relevant domains with a URL match of /user/*
  3. Perform a standard “Proxy” action pointing to your webserver
  4. Ensure the “Cache lifetime” is set to 0 to prevent caching the login route
  5. Save the rule
  6. Create another new rule for any/all relevant domains with a URL match of *
  7. Perform a standard “Proxy” action pointing to your webserver
  8. This time, tick the “Only with cookie” option and provide SSESS* as the cookie name
  9. Save the rule. You should be able to login at /user/login and update content normally

Option 2: Separate Editorial Domain

Running your CMS on a separate domain provides clear separation between your public site and editorial interface.

WordPress Editorial Domain Setup

Set your new WordPress CMS domain in your wp-config.php file as below, or follow the WordPress.org guide for more options.

define( 'WP_HOME', 'https://wordpress.example.com' );
define( 'WP_SITEURL', 'https://wordpress.example.com' );

The most flexible choice is to allow your WordPress site to respond on any domain, and under any protocol. This allows the site to run under both edit.example.com as well as www.example.com.

To allow this simply make the following change in wp-config.php:

$protocol = stripos($_SERVER['SERVER_PROTOCOL'],'https') === 0 ? 'https://' : 'http://';


if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'])) {
  define('WP_SITEURL', $protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
  define('WP_HOME', $protocol . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
}

Drupal Editorial Domain Setup

Ensure your CMS domain is included in your Drupal settings.php file (trusted_host_patterns array). For example:

$settings['trusted_host_patterns'] = [
  // Public URLs.
  '^www\.quantcdn\.io$',
  '^quantcdn\.io$',
  // Editorial / admin domain.
  '^edit\.quantcdn\.io$'
];

For more detail see the Drupal.org page.

Security Considerations

:::tip Editorial Domain Security For improved security choose a highly randomized CMS domain, put behind basic authentication, or move to a private network. You have much greater control over access once you use Quant to serve public traffic. :::

Enhanced Security Options

  • Random Domain Names: Use unpredictable editorial domain names (e.g., cms-a8f9x2.example.com)
  • Basic Authentication: Add HTTP basic authentication to your editorial domain
  • IP Restrictions: Limit CMS access to specific IP addresses or ranges
  • VPN Access: Place editorial domains behind VPN for additional security
  • Two-Factor Authentication: Enable 2FA in your CMS for additional protection

Benefits of CMS Integration

Performance Optimization

  • Static Delivery: Public visitors receive optimized static content
  • Global CDN: Content delivered from edge locations worldwide
  • Caching: Aggressive caching for maximum performance
  • Image Optimization: Automatic image compression and format optimization

Editorial Workflow

  • Familiar Interface: Continue using your existing CMS interface
  • Real-time Updates: Content changes are pushed to Quant automatically
  • Preview Capabilities: Test changes before making them live
  • Revision Control: Maintain content versioning and editorial workflows

Operational Benefits

  • Reduced Server Load: Origin server only handles editorial traffic
  • Improved Security: Reduced attack surface for public-facing site
  • Scalability: Handle traffic spikes without impacting CMS performance
  • Reliability: Static delivery ensures high availability

The go-live process for CMS integrations provides the best of both worlds: the performance and security benefits of static delivery combined with the editorial convenience of your existing content management workflow.