Hiding and deleting

Three states, and only one action in the whole product actually deletes anything.

Enabled, disabled, trashed

Enabled is the normal state. Once the page has been published, it is on the live site.

Disabled keeps the page in your dashboard and off the internet. Use it for something half-written, or a seasonal page you want back later. A disabled page is not in your sitemap and is not served at its address.

Trashed moves it into the trash tab. Also off the live site, also still yours.

All three apply to articles, blocks and forms as well as pages.

Status does not wait for Publish

This is the one thing in the product that does not. Everything else you change — the words, the styling, even a page’s address — sits in your drafts until you press Publish. A status change reaches the live site at once.

That is deliberate, and it is the direction that matters: taking something down is a thing people need now, not after a review step. Disable a page and it leaves the internet immediately, without publishing anything else you happen to have in progress.

It works the same way coming back. Enable a page that was published before you disabled it and it returns straight away, at the address it was being served at — not at some rename you made in the meantime and have not published. A rename is unpublished work, and putting a page back must not publish it.

A page that has never been published has nothing to return to, so enabling it does what you would expect: nothing happens until you publish.

Trashing moves nothing

A trashed page keeps its place in the tree and keeps its address. That is what makes restoring it work — put it back and it returns where it was, rather than landing at the top level for you to re-file.

The homepage is protected

It cannot be disabled or trashed while it is the homepage. Choose a different homepage first.

Emptying the trash is the only delete

There is no delete-this-one. The trash empties as a whole, and that is the only action in the product that destroys anything.

Everything else — disabling, trashing, even deleting a page from the tree — is recoverable, either by putting it back or from Publish history.

A page emptied from the trash is gone, and a restore that would have included it says so by name rather than silently skipping it.

Deleting a page with pages inside it

Its children are promoted to its parent rather than deleted with it. Their addresses change to match, and the redirects follow.