CMS Announcements
⚠️ CMS content releases are down ⚠️
UPDATE 7/26/2021 11:20 a.m. ET: This issue is fixed! Scheduled publishing in the CMS is now back on track. You can see the full schedule of when content is released here. Thank you for your patience.
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Due to a networking error, content releases have not been occurring since 11am ET, Friday, 7/23/21.
You won’t be able to see your published changes until this is resolved. We’re sorry to be holding up your work, but not to worry -- the appropriate folks are engaged and working towards a resolution.
Concerns? Give our helpdesk a shout by emailing VACMSsupport@va.gov -- happy to help!
⚠️ Announcement - Limited Accessibility ⚠️
UPDATE 7/9/2021 10:58 a.m. ET: This issue is fixed! You can now resume logging in with your PIV/Smartcard. Thank you for your patience.
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Some users are unable to login to the CMS Production environment using PIV cards.
Our engineers are already on top of a fix and we expect this issue to be resolved shortly but do not have specific time for this yet.
Thank you for your patience.
Reach out to the CMS Help Desk with questions or concerns.
⚠️ Unplanned CMS downtime on Monday ⚠️
UPDATE 6/28/2021 4:00 p.m. ET: This issue is fixed! You can now resume using the CMS. Thank you for your patience.
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The Production Server is down currently on Monday 6/28 for an unknown period of time.
You won’t be able to use the CMS during this time. We’re sorry to be holding up your work, but not to worry -- the appropriate folks are engaged and working towards a resolution.
Concerns? Give our helpdesk a shout by emailing VACMSsupport@va.gov -- happy to help!
🚧 Content Releases will be paused from 4:30 - 6:00 PM ET on Wednesday May 5, 2021
March 5, 2021: In order to support the Content Build Separation release, content releases to VA.gov will be paused during the launch window on May 5th from 4:30 - 6:00 PM ET. Additionally, the daily maintenance window for the CMS will be moved one hour later, from 3:30 to 4:30 PM ET.
How does this affect me?
You may edit and publish content as usual when the CMS is available, but the regularly scheduled content release at 5:00 PM ET will not occur, and manual content releases will be unavailable during the launch window. After the launch is complete, the CMS team will perform a content release and post a system banner confirming that content releases are live.
🆕 CMS content releases to VA.gov will become more frequent
March 3, 2021: The VA.gov CMS team has exciting news to share - we will begin to gradually increase the frequency of published content releases to VA.gov so you can get content to Veterans faster.
Content Release frequency will increase in phases:
- Phase 1 - Content Release runs twice a day - 11AM, 3PM EST Mon-Fri - Starting today (3/3)!
- Phase 2 - four times a day - 9AM, 11AM, 3PM, 4PM EST Mon-Fri
- Phase 3 - eight times day - every hour between 9AM and 4PM EST Mon-Fri
- Phase 4 - every hour between 8AM and 8PM EST Mon-Fri
What is a Content Release?
The Content Release process is what makes CMS content go live on VA.gov, by converting all published content in the Drupal CMS to publicly visible pages.
Where are we at?
We are in Phase 1.
As of 3/3/21, Content Releases run twice a day at the following times:
- 11AM EST / 8AM PST
- 3PM EST / 12PM PST *
Today, the Content Release process takes somewhere between 5 to 15 minutes to complete given that there are no technical or content issues. The times specified above depict the beginning of the Content Release, where all published content is collected and queued for processing.
* NOTE: 3PM EST / 12PM PST - is the time of a full Va.gov code deployment + Content Release. This deployment / release will always take longer than scheduled content-only releases.
Besides scheduled releases, content may also be released manually from the Drupal CMS interface or based on certain events that occur in the Drupal CMS.
ADDITIONAL INFO: The duration of the Content Release will depend on the total published content volume in the Drupal CMS. We are closely monitoring the performance of the Content Release process and actively exploring avenues to optimize the underlying technology to reduce Content Release duration times.
What’s next?
Once we’ve validated the stability of the Phase 1 Content Release frequency, we will move to Phase 2 - Content Release four times a day: 9AM, 11AM, 3PM, 4PM EST Mon-Fri.
We will let you know as we increase Content Release frequency, so keep an eye out for emails from the Drupal CMS Support team.
How does this affect me?
Your published content will go live on VA.gov much sooner.
IMPORTANT: During each Content Release all content that is published in the Drupal CMS by you and all other editors will be released to the VA.gov public website and become visible to Veterans.
Please be mindful of your publishing activities and do not publish content that should not be released to VA.gov.
Remember to save your content in Draft until you are fully confident it is ready to go live on VA.gov.
NOTE: Broken links that are introduced on any page will block content releases. Please check on-page alerts for broken links before publishing your content.
What should I do if I accidentally published a page that should not be released to VA.gov?
If your page already exists on VA.gov, but you published a new revision with changes that should not yet be visible on VA.gov, reference Drupal CMS Orientation - Session 5 video that explains how to work with content revisions.
If your page has never been published on VA.gov and you set it to “Published”, then edit the page, set the state to “Archived” in the Editorial Workflow section of the form and save.
How do I know when the last Content Release happened?
Log in to the Drupal CMS and look for the content release icon on the top right of the navigation toolbar. Hover over it to see the time of the last Content Release.
🙋🏼♂️🙋🏻♀️🙋🏿 Getting help with the CMS
Jan 20 2021: We streamlined the CMS Help Desk to handle your requests through a single, easy-to-use form to get help, ask a question, or make a suggestion about the CMS.
- Contact the CMS Help Desk from any of the following places:
- CMS help center home page
- At the bottom of any page in the CMS help center
- 👉 Right here!
- Send us a message to request help, report a problem, ask a question, or make a suggestion. We're here for it.
- Check your email for a confirmation, and expect to get an initial response within a business day or sooner.
Please don't hesitate to reach out. We look forward to hearing from you.
— Ero and Vanessa, CMS Help Desk team
✂️ Improved: Tidier Sections menu
Tuesday, January 5, 2021: Hundreds of new VAMCs in the CMS = great news for Veterans, terrible news for some folks trying to navigate an enormous Sections menu.Like our quarantine tresses, the menu needed a little trim, so we limited the menu to the top level items only so it’s easier to navigate.
- Navigate first to the ’VAMC facilities, then select the VISN or VAMC you want to work on.
- Alternately, you can navigate by the sections listed on your use profile page.
💬 Fixed: Revision log message box
Monday Nov 30, 4:00 p.m. ET: Revision log messages: they're like useful love notes to your future self, reminding you and your teammates of what you did whenever you save changes. But until today, not everyone was able to write them. Sorry about that!
- All content editors, including VAMC editors, can now leave revision log messages
- Reminder: It's best practice to leave a revision log message _every time_ you make changes so everyone has a good record of how the content evolved.
👍 New: Mark content as approved
Nov 24 2020: The content is done, you sent it to your boss/the stakeholders/a peer reviewer, but how do you know when they've given their thumbs up? The new moderation state "Approved" helps teams clearly flag when content marked "In review" is done and ready for publication (or whatever might be your next step).
- "In review" and "Approved" states are available, but not required.
- Content teams can use this state to create more clarity around their content
- Continuing to leave good revision log messages will help you facilitate the editorial process.
Questions? Feedback? Contact CMS Helpdesk
🤭 ↩️ Go back to publishing from the edit from
Nov 24, 2020 4:00 p.m. ET: Last week we made a change to the editorial workflow designed to reduce the possibility of accidentally publishing content, a concern raised by several CMS editors. The solution we rolled out improved the workflow for most situations, but it made it significantly more confusing in others. Sorry about that!
Today we’ve reverted the workflow closer to the way it was before, but with one small and significant change designed to prevent accidental publishing of content.
When editing content as a content publisher, you have to opt in to publishing before you save. “Published” will never be the default state.
Questions? Feedback? Contact CMS Support at VACMSSupport@va.gov
⚠️ Planned CMS downtime on Tuesday ⚠️
The CMS will be down from 7:00 a.m. - 8:45 a.m. ET on Tuesday 11/24 for extended maintenance.
You won’t be able to use the CMS during this time. We’re sorry to be holding up your work, but not to worry -- unlike your uncle’s Turkey Day coma, this downtime will only last a few hours.
PS. The CMS will also be down at the daily scheduled time -- 3:00 p.m. ET, but just for the usual 10 minutes or less.
Concerns? Give our helpdesk a shout by emailing VACMSsupport@va.gov -- they’ve promised to lay off the tryptophan long enough to assist.
⏰ Time zones for date & time fields
Nov 17 4:00 p.m. ET: Add "minding our time zones" to the list of new norms that are helping us survive 2020. With the latest CMS release, you can now include a time zone anywhere you'd add a date and a time, such as:
- Events
- Situation updates on VAMC Operating Status pages
✨ Improved: Cloning content is more intuitive and stable
If you have cloned content in the CMS, you may have experienced long lists of confusing checkboxes for parts of the content on the page. Those checkboxes produced some unexpected results for editors. We have removed these options to reduce confusion, and to improve some stability in the CMS.
✨Improved: Publish from the View page
Nov 4 2020 3:30 p.m. ET
Accidental publishing: it’s the thing we content people dread. Fortunately thanks to this latest release you don’t need to live in fear. We changed the publishing workflow to help you avoid using the wrong editorial workflow state when saving content.
Now at the bottom of the edit form you’ll have the option to save as either Draft or In review only. After saving, you’ll then have the option to publish content from the View page.
Note, if the content already has a published version, and you now need to publish the latest draft, you’ll find the option to publish on the “Latest version” tab when viewing the content.
🌱 New: Fresh look for top menu + find help
10/8/2020: After the release today you’ll notice a few changes in the top menu:
- Changed the color of the top menu to blue to match VA’s brand
- Cleaned up some unnecessary menu items
- Added a new menu item called Help for the CMS help center
Find resources in the CMS help center:
- Help guides on common tasks
- How to contact CMS Support
- See announcements and release notes (helpful for those not in Slack)
- No login necessary
(The CMS Help center is still in progress -- thank you for your patience while we continue to build out new resources for our editors ).
⚠️ Log in with PIV/Smartcard not working
UPDATE 10/6/2020 4:10 p.m. ET: This issue is fixed! You can now resume logging in with your PIV/Smartcard. Thank you for your patience.
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10/5/2020 6:56 p.m. ET: Multiple users are experiencing problems with PIV/Smartcard login for prod.cms.va.gov and aren't able to log in. The CMS team is looking into the root cause. Until it is resolved, please use the following the workaround:
- Go to https://prod.cms.va.gov/user/logout
- Login with username and password for now (do not click the "Login with PIV or other Smartcard" option)
- If you don't have a CMS password, contact the CMS Support Helpdesk at VACMSSupport@va.gov
- Thank you for your patience while we resolve this issue.
⚠️ Publishing alert
7/15/2020 2:37 AM ET: We’re experiencing a problem with content releases that will delay when you see new published content go live on VA.gov. Sorry to be holding up your work today! We’re working on a fix, and will let you know here when it’s resolved.
🌱 New: Standardized names for deployments
06/17/2020: What the deploy? There’s lots of deployments, and we know it hasn’t always been easy to understand which ones will affect your work and when. We created standardized names for the deployments that affect content editors so everyone can start to communicate more clearly.
- VA.gov full code deployments = @ 2:00pm ET, updates front-end templates and causes a content release
- Content releases = @2:00pm ET, causes published content to go live
- CMS deployments = @3:30pm ET, won’t let you use the CMS while the code is being updated.
For the full details, check out this VA.gov + CMS deployments artifact. We also created a cliff notes version for easy sharing.
