Manual Publishing

NOTE: This method of publishing is no longer being actively supported by our product team and will not receive any updates in the future. We suggest consulting the following article for more information on the latest publishing methods that we offer. Please contact support@getfastr.com with any questions about what publishing method might work best for your website.

Manual Publishing is a more direct way of publishing Creator Studio Experiences and groups on your web site. A Slot represents the information needed to publish an Experience directly to your website. It enables you to publish Experiences and groups on one or more of your HTML containers. You can create such configuration directly from the Publish interface.

Manual Publishing can be found in both the Main Dashboard and the Project Dashboard.

The following information will focus explicitly on the Manual Publishing section and how to fully take advantage the manual Slot configuration - this feature can be especially useful when deploying the same Experience to multiple pages on your domain, assuming you have:

• Logged into your Creator Studio account and created or edited an existing Experience.
• Clicked "Push" when finished. Expect 2 - 10 minutes for the update to finish fully distributing to the Content Delivery Network, then click Got to Publish.
• Set up your website to use Creator Studio channels (mandatory if you want to push live Experiences).

Setup a Slot

If you wish to insert an Experience or a group of Breakpoint Variants via manual publishing, you can create a new Slot by clicking the Add Slot button. Once clicked you will get a Create Slot popup, as shown in the picture below:

The creation of the slot requires five pieces of information:

1) Title: the name of the slot. We recommend that you use a descriptive and relevant name to help with managing the slots over time.

2) CSS Selector: the CSS selector will match an existing HTML container on your web site with where the Experience will be placed once the slot is published. Note:  A single CSS selector can point to one or more different elements on your web site, so be careful when choosing it.  We recommend to use a CSS identifier selector (for instance #my-id), which will uniquely identify one and only one element within the page.

3) URL: The URL of your web site to where the HTML container is present and the Experience is to be deployed. This can be:

• an absolute URL (for instance https://yourwebsite.com)
• a URL mixed with a wildcard (*yourwebsite.com) - wildcards are explained a bit more in detail this article. 
• left blank, which means it will match any page where the snippet is placed on your site.

Depending on the type of URL,, the Experience will appear on a particular URL or on more pages (when using wildcards). Moreover, once created, the Slot information (name, CSS selector and URL) can be edited and saved again. Important: please note that query parameters are not currently supported by the platform, thus they should not be entered in the URL field.

4) Experience Live: The Experience and/or group associated with the Slot configuration and which will appear on your web page once the Slot is published. 

5) Experience Scheduled and Schedule Date: If you wish to schedule an Experience to be published or to be taken down in the future.

• To publish an Experience in the future, pick the Experience from the drop-down
• To take down an Experience at a certain time in the future, select "No Experience".

You will also need to select a Schedule Date, which will indicate at what time (your local time) the Experience has be to published or taken down.

Configured Slot Example

See an example of Slot configuration. We are creating a Slot called Summer Slot - 2015, which will publish an Experience called "Summer Experience -2015" on the HTML element identified by the "#main-container" CSS Selector to the website https(or http)://mywebsite.com/campaign/summer. This Experience will be live until October 1th local time and will be replaced by another Experience called "Fall Experience - 2015".

Ready to Publish

Once happy with the configuration:

• Click on the OK button in the lightbox (this will temporarily save the Slot configuration, not publish it!).
• Finally click the Save/Publish button so that the Slot configuration can be saved and be updated on our CDN infrastructure.

Depending on whether the selected URL has a snippet on it, the Experience will show up in a few minutes. If no snippet is present on your page, the Experience will not show up but a configuration be saved so that the Experience will appear live once the snippet has been placed in your page.

Order of Slot execution
The order of the slots to be applied on your website is not a reflection on how you see them in Creator Studio. The order is dictated by when a Slot is published.

Examples:
In Publish section in Creator Studio you have 3 slots, named Slot1, Slot2 and Slot3, which have the same CSS selector and same URL or wildcard or both. When you save and publish lets say, Slot1 first, then Slot2 and Slot3, the one which will be displayed is Slot1. They will be published in the order they are queued, so in this case will be.

Slot3
Slot2
Slot1

and Slot 1 will override the other 2.

If you now modify Slot2, the queue will look like:

Slot2
Slot3
Slot1

and still Slot1 will be shown.

If you modify Slot1, the queue will look like:

Slot1
Slot2
Slot3,

and now Slot 3 will be the one displayed.

IMPORTANT: It is critical that you ensure that the combination of CSS selector IDs and the web pages corresponding to the URL with the wildcard do not lead to the experience being published to unintended pages.
As an example: If you have a DIV element with the ID "#my-id" and use that element on all pages on your site and your URL is defined as “yourwebsite.com/*” then the experience will shown up on all pages on your site.

If you have any question or  concerns with any of the above please contact support@getfastr.com before publishing