Cross-site publishing is a publishing method in SharePoint 2013. It lets you create and maintain content in one or more authoring site collections, and publish this content across one or more publishing site collections, by using Search Web Parts.
Cross-site publishing Features:
- Can be used across site collections, web applications, and even across farms.
- Separates content authoring from branding and rendering, meaning how you author content has nothing to do with how it is displayed to users.
- Allows you to mix pages and catalog content.
Consider a scenario where you want to store information about the Apple Products , we'll create a Product Catalog Site Collection. We'll use this site collection to author and store information about the Apple Products . For example, info about the "IpodNano" "Iphone5S", or the Laptop "Iphone5C".
Along with this, we'll be creating a Publishing Portal Site Collection. We'll use this site collection to display Apple product info about "IpodNano" "Iphone5S", or the Laptop "Iphone5C". So basically, information about the products are stored in a Catalog site collection but displayed in a different site Collection.
The flow diagram for Cross site publishing is as follows.
Authoring Site Collections ------> Search Index ----------> Publishing Site Collections.
To enable the Search Index, you should create product list item as catalogs from List settings. Once you do that, Set up search and enable the crawling of your authoringcontent.