Overview
You will want to start out with Slate by first creating a “staging” site. This instance of Slate will serve as your workspace for customizing and testing out features of Slate. Later you will set up a “live” site for your actual users. The live site will mirror your staging site, but have its own database and only be synchronized with your changes to the staging site on your command.
This setup enables you to experiment with changes and take some time implementing and testing them without interfering with your users’ experience. Once your new changes are perfected on the staging site, you can roll them out to the live site all at once.
Prerequisite steps
Create a staging site
Log in to your Emergence server’s control panel (http://example.com:9083) as you left off at the end of the previous step.
Click Create Site.
In the Site Label field, enter something like My School Name (staging).
Tab to Handle and a handle will be suggested for your site. The handle will serve as a sort-of “username” for the site within other systems, so it needs to be simple, short, and unique. For your staging site, we recommend a handle ending in -staging.
Due to restrictions in other tools, handles must be 16 characters or less. If the system highlights your handle as an error, it may be too long.
Tab to the Primary Hostname field and enter a fully qualified domain name that will resolve to your Emergence server and be used to access your staging site.
If your domain name is example.com, you might enter slate-staging.example.com here. Then create an “A record” in your domain control panel for example.com, pointing slate-staging.example.com to the IP address of your Emergence machine.
Tab to the Alt. Hostnames field. You can leave this field blank, or enter any number of additional hostnames that you want to use to access this staging site.
Tab to the Parent Site field and enter v1.slate.is.
Tab to the Parent Access Key field and enter o9B11mbIXY1proH7 (this is the public inheritence key for v1.slate.is).
Under the First User section, fill in details for your initial account. This should be personal to you, and will give you access to log in and make changes to your Slate site and its code. You can create additional accounts for other developers, administrators, and users later on, from within Slate.
Finally, click Save Site and Emergence will set up the site instance for you. The new site will show up at the bottom of your sites list with a red marker to indicate that it’s saving. Once the red marker disappears, your site is ready and you can open it through the primary hostname you assigned.
