Drafts, publishing and versions

You never edit the live website directly. You edit a draft, save it as often as you like, and only when it is ready do you publish it. This page explains what each button does, what the website sees in the meantime, and how to undo a mistake with the version history.

Two copies of every document

A document of a publishable type exists in two copies:

the draft, which you edit in the admin,
the published copy, which the website shows.

Saving changes only the draft. The website keeps showing the published copy until someone publishes again. So you can rework a live page over several days without visitors seeing half-finished text.

flowchart LR
  A[You edit] -->|Save| B[Draft]
  B -->|Publish| C[Published copy]
  C --> D[Website]
  C -->|Unpublish| E[Gone from the website]

What the buttons do

The buttons are in the header of the document editor, see Editing content.

Button	What happens	What the website sees
Save	Stores the draft and records a new version	No change
Publish	Copies the draft to the published copy. If there are unsaved changes, it saves them first. Refused if another document already has the value of a Unique field live	The new content
Unpublish	Removes the published copy. The draft stays	The page is gone, and so is every page below it in the tree
Delete (the trash button)	Removes the document, its published copy and every document below it in the tree. It cannot be undone	Everything is gone

Publish is only active when there is something new to publish: the document was never published, or it was changed since. Unpublish is only active when the document is published.

Only people whose role allows publishing see Publish, Unpublish and Schedule. An Author, for example, can write and save but not publish. For types that need approval, authors ask for approval instead; see Notifications and approvals.

The status badge

Next to the document’s title in the editor, a badge tells you the state the document would be in if you closed the tab now:

Badge	Meaning
new	Not saved yet at all
unsaved	You changed something and have not saved it
draft	Saved, but never published (or unpublished again). The website does not show it
live	Published, and the website shows exactly what you see
changed	Published, but saved again since. The website still shows the older published copy. Publish to update it
scheduled	A publish or unpublish date is set (shown in addition to the others)

In the content tree, a small green dot next to a title means the document is published.

Types without publishing

When a document type has Publishable switched off (see How content is organised), its documents have only one copy and no Publish button. They are never published, so the website’s public API never shows them. Use such types only for content the admin itself needs, not for anything visitors should see.

Planning a publication

You can set a date and time at which a document goes live, comes down again, or both. This is handy for a campaign page that should appear on Monday morning and disappear after the weekend.

Open the document and save it at least once.
Click Schedule in the editor’s header.
Fill in Publish at (goes live at this time), Unpublish at (comes down at this time), or both.
Click Save schedule.

You should see the message “Schedule saved”, and the scheduled badge appears next to the title. Hover over the badge to see the dates.

Good to know:

The dates are checked every few seconds, so a document goes live within about half a minute of the time you set.
A scheduled publish publishes the draft as it is at that moment, exactly like clicking Publish. Keep saving your changes until then.
Unpublish at must be later than Publish at, or the schedule is refused.
Publishing by hand clears Publish at and keeps Unpublish at. Unpublishing by hand clears Unpublish at.
Clear in the Schedule panel removes both dates.

Versions

Every save keeps a snapshot of the whole document: title, slug, place in the tree and every field. You can go back to any of them.

Open the document and click History in the editor’s header. The History card appears in the sidebar of the editor, with one row per version (v1, v2, …) and the date and time it was saved.
Click Restore on the version you want.
Confirm with Restore.

You should see the message “Restored version” followed by its number. Restoring does not throw anything away: the restored state is saved as a new version, so you can restore the newer one again if you change your mind.

Each translation of a document has its own history; see Languages and translations.

When two people edit the same document

The admin notices when someone else saves the document you have open. You then see a note such as “Anna saved this document just now; saving your version would be refused.” If you try to save anyway, Manablox refuses, so nobody’s work is silently overwritten. The message says “Someone else saved this document while you were editing” and shows both version numbers.

Click Discard my changes and reload to load the other person’s version. If you need your own changes, copy them somewhere first, reload, and add them again.

Leaving with unsaved changes

If you try to leave the editor with unsaved changes, the admin asks Leave without saving?. Choose Keep editing to stay, or Discard changes to leave and lose them.

What else happens when you publish

Publishing, unpublishing, saving and deleting can also start other things your team has set up: a workflow that sends an email, or a webhook that tells another system about the change. Every one of these actions is also recorded in Activity. When you unpublish a page, every page below it that was live counts as unpublished too: each one starts the workflows and webhooks for unpublishing and gets its own entry in Activity.