Understanding variation inheritance

Some publications create variations of assets for different audiences, such as an article for US audience and a variation of that article for an international audience. Brightspot uses inheritance to manage the content between audience variations. (For other examples of audience variations, see Creating audience variations.)

• When you start a new audience variation, its fields inherit content from the default variation.
  

  

• When you modify fields in the default variation, those changes cascade to the corresponding fields in the audience variation. The cascading stops when one of the following is true:
  
  • You changed a field in the audience variation. Brightspot protects such changes from being overwritten from the default variation.
  • You intentionally canceled the inheritance from the default variation as described in Creating audience variations.

Example 1: Text flow for unchanged fields

Adam Braun is responsible for delivering assets to native English speakers as well as to an international audience. In the default variation for native speakers, he uses idioms; in the international variation, he uses standard wording. He also wants to keep the audience variation as current as possible by allowing cascading changes from the default variation.

Adam is currently working on an article about migrating a publication from print to digital. The default variation has a headline and subheadline.	The phrase doubling down is an idiom that may not be familiar to international speakers, so Adam makes a variation of this asset for his international audience. When he initially creates the international variation, the wording flows from the default variation.

He then changes the international variation's headline from Doubling down on digital transformation to Pursuing a digital transformation.

Back in the default variation, he modifies the headline.	Because Adam changed the headline in the international variation, the inheritance from the default variation in that field is disconnected. Back in the international variation, the headline no longer cascades from the default variation.

Next, in the default variation, Adam rewords the subheadline to include the keyword CMS.	Because Adam did not change the subheadline in the international variation, the link to that field is still live with the default variation. His change in the subheadline cascades.

Example 2: Blocking all variation inheritance

In another scenario, Adam publishes default and international variations, but the audiences are so disparate that he wants to avoid changes in the default variation from cascading. (For information about blocking variation inheritance, see Creating content variations.)

For the default variation, he creates a headline and subheadline.	He then starts an international variation, which initially inherits text from the default variation.

Adam returns to the default variation to make an update to the headline and subheadline fields.	Adam views the international variation. Because all inheritance is blocked, neither the headline nor the subheadline change.