Drafts and publishing

The most important idea in the control panel: saving is not publishing. This guide follows your post announcing payment reminders from first draft to the site, and back.

After reading this guide, you will know:

• What saving does to a new entry and to a live one.
• How to preview a draft exactly as the site will show it.
• How to publish now, or schedule for later.
• How review works when a site turns it on.
• How to go back to an earlier version, and how to take something off the site.
• What visitors see, and when.

1. Drafts

A new entry is a draft until it is published: nobody outside the control panel can see it. Save draft keeps your work; do it as often as you like.

An entry that is already live works the same way. Save changes stores your edits as a draft of the live entry — the site keeps showing the published version until you publish the draft. That is what makes it safe to rework a landing page over several days, hand it to a colleague for a look, or change your mind.

Discard changes throws the draft away and goes back to what is live.

2. Previewing

Live Preview shows the draft exactly as the site will render it — the real theme, the real layout — with a bar across the top so nobody mistakes it for the live page. Use it before publishing, rather than publishing to see what something looks like.

3. Publishing

Publish — or Publish changes, for a live entry — puts it on the site. From that moment visitors see it, the sitemap lists it, site search finds it and, for the blog, the feed carries it.

An entry with no publish date takes the moment you publish it.

Publish changes asks for a short message about what changed, which the entry’s history keeps beside the revision. It is optional. To stop being asked, open the arrow beside the button and choose Publish straight away; the choice is remembered for you alone, and Ask for a message brings the question back.

3.1 Scheduling

Give an entry a publish date in the future, in the column on the right, and publishing schedules it instead: the button reads Schedule. A job runs every minute and publishes whatever has come due, so nobody needs to be at a desk when it happens.

Tidewater announces features at 9am on Tuesdays. You write the post the week before, set the date, and schedule it.

Collections that allow it also have an unpublish date — for an offer or an event that ends.

4. Review

Some collections require review: whoever wrote an entry cannot publish it themselves.

1. The author chooses Submit for review. The entry shows as In review.
2. Someone whose role may approve opens it, previews it, and chooses Approve, or Send back to return it to draft for another round.
3. Once approved, it is published — by the approver, or by anyone whose role may publish.

Each step is recorded in the entry’s history. If a collection does not use review, you will never see these buttons.

5. Revisions

Every publish keeps a revision. History, at the top of the editor, lists them: who published what, and when.

Restore on any revision makes a new draft from it rather than changing the live page, so you can look at it, change your mind, and publish or discard it. Going back is never itself a risky act.

6. Unpublishing

Unpublish takes an entry off the site and keeps everything about it. It is not deletion: nothing is thrown away, and it can be published again at any time. A visitor who follows an old link finds a missing page, which is counted — see Redirects and SEO.

7. What visitors see, and when

Publishing updates the site immediately. Pages are cached for speed, and publishing clears exactly the pages that used what changed — the post itself, the blog listing, the home page if the post appears there, the feed. You never have to think about the cache, and you should never have to wait for it.