What is a Project?

A Project is a way to group and organize multiple Sites on CloudCannon when they are all copies of the same website. For example, a Project might consist of a Production Site (i.e., the version you want website visitors to see), a Staging Site (i.e., the version where you preview every Team Member's changes before they go live), and any branched Sites your team is using to draft changes.

graph BT
  A["Site 3:<br/>Write a new blog"] -->|Publishes to| S["Site 2:<br/>Staging"]
  B["Site 4:<br/>Remove a product page"] -->|Publishes to| S
  C["Site 5:<br/>Update Site navigation"] -->|Publishes to| S
  S -->|Publishes to| P["Site 1:<br/>Production"]

You can access the Projects Browser using the Projects link in the App Sidebar. For a tour of the Project interface, including the Projects Browser, Project Sites Browser, Publishing tab, and Project Settings tab, please read our documentation on what the Project Browser is.

Why use a Project?#

Projects are useful when you want multiple Team Members to work on content independently without affecting the live website. Common scenarios include:

• Create a Staging workflow — Maintain a Production Site for your live website and a Staging Site where your team previews changes. Team Members create their own branched Sites from Staging to draft changes, then publish those changes to Staging for review before they go live on Production.
• Make content changes in parallel — Multiple Team Members can create their own branched Sites from your Main Branch, work on changes independently, and publish their changes when ready.
• Control Branch Defaults — Set the default Publishing Method, authentication, and permissions for all branched Sites in your Project using Branch Defaults.

Without a Project, you would need to configure each Site, its publishing settings, and its branching workflow individually.

For more information on Projects, please read our documentation on creating a Project or deleting a Project. For more information on how CloudCannon makes copies of Sites so Team Members can work independently, please read our documentation on what branching is.