Drafts and publishing

The most important idea in the control panel: saving is not publishing.

When you save an entry that is already live, you create a draft. The site carries on showing the published version until you deliberately publish the draft. That is what makes it safe to work on a page over several days, to hand it to somebody for a look, or to change your mind.

A new entry that has never been published is simply a draft, and nobody can see it.

Previewing

A draft can be previewed exactly as the site will render it, with a bar across the top making it clear you are looking at something unpublished. Use it before you publish rather than publishing to see what it looks like.

Publishing

Publish makes the draft the live page. From that moment visitors see it, the sitemap knows about it, and search on your site can find it.

If the entry is scheduled — see below — publishing sets the time rather than doing it this second.

Revisions

Every publish keeps a revision, and the list shows who changed what and when.

Any revision can be restored. Restoring creates a new draft from that old version rather than overwriting what is live, so you can look at it, change your mind, and publish it or throw it away. Going back is never itself a risky act.

Scheduling

An entry can be given a publish date in the future. A job runs every minute and publishes whatever has come due, so a scheduled entry needs nothing from you at the time — not even a browser open.

Entries can be unpublished on a schedule too, where the site has that turned on, which suits anything with an end date like a job listing or an offer.

Review

Some sites turn on review, where an entry cannot be published by whoever wrote it. The author sends it for review, somebody with the right role approves it, and the approval is recorded alongside the entry’s history.

If your site does not use review you will never see it. If it does, the buttons on the entry say where it is in the process.

Unpublishing

Unpublishing takes an entry off the site and keeps everything about it. It is not deletion — nothing is thrown away, and you can publish it again at any time.

As with a slug change, its old URL is left pointing somewhere sensible rather than simply breaking.

What visitors see, and when

Publishing updates the site immediately. Pages are cached for speed, and publishing clears exactly the pages that depended on what you changed — the entry itself, the listings it appears in, the home page if it is featured there. You do not have to think about the cache, and you should not have to wait for it.