Site Creation Timeline

Prior to Requesting a Site:

1. Reach out to Hostmasters – submit a request to to evaluate the proposed URL of the site. The Hostmasters group consists of representatives from Strategic Communications, Legal, and InfoSec teams. Together, they ensure that your site will not run afoul of any branding or trademark considerations. It is *very* beneficial to complete this step prior to submitting a site request, and minimize the number of iterations.
2. Find and assign team members to be content creators and admins.
3. Review Terms of Service.

Site Request and Building:

Once there is an agreement between the Hostmasters and you, you are ready to submit an external website request form. A temporary development site (pre-populated with a MITRE-approved template) will be created for you in approximately one business day. The purpose of the temporary development site is to give you an opportunity to work on site content immediately.

In the meantime, an MPN team member will be working diligently to create proper development, integration, and production sites. A sequence of activities will take place – luckily, they will not require your involvement:

1. The name must be added to the virtual machine that the site will live on.
2. Sites must be created manually, including all base components.
3. Single sign-on must be configured for each site individually.
4. If there are special case conditions, those settings and configurations must be applied.
5. Content from temporary site will then be migrated.

Your responsibility is perhaps the most fun one – building out the site content! You can use the template as a starting point, and start inserting content that will make the site truly yours. There are plenty WordPress / Divi resources available (Divi is the front-end engine that you will interact with when building the site). If you need expert assistance, dedicated WordPress designers are available to softshell to your project.

If you are new to working in a development environment, please review the TAPS process. 

Permissions and Approvals:

Once site content has been developed to a reasonable degree, we can proceed towards publishing the site (i.e., making it accessible to the internet). There are two main steps:

1. InfoSec review. The review is requested and coordinated by the MPN team, to ensure that any potential vulnerabilities are addressed.
2. Public Release. PRS submission is handled by you – you would submit the dev site URL in lieu of a document, and have the site go through the proper approval chain. Once the PRS process is complete, the release statement / number are added to the website footer.