Drafts and Publish

Every record in a site exists twice: the draft you are editing, and the published version a visitor sees.

The two versions

They are fully independent. The draft moves every time you or the AI changes something; the published version moves only when you press Publish.

This applies to pages, to blocks, to collections and their items, and to the site’s own settings — the colours and fonts, the site CSS and the metadata. All of it is drafted, all of it is published together.

What Publish does

It takes every draft that has changed, promotes it, recompiles the site, and writes the result out. One press, one release, everything at once.

There is no way to publish a single page, and that is a decision rather than a missing feature: a page can embed a block, link to a sibling and depend on the site’s CSS, so sending one alone can produce a live page that is broken rather than merely stale.

One thing does not wait: status

Enabling, disabling or trashing a page, article, block or form reaches the live site at once, without a Publish. Taking something down is a thing people need now rather than after a review step.

Everything else waits — including addresses. See Status and trash.

The badge

Beside the button is a count of what is waiting. It compares each record’s draft with the release that is live right now, so it cannot drift: there is no separate note of what was published to get out of step.

If it shows nothing, your drafts and the live site match.

Publish checks before it promotes

A release is validated first, against the drafts, and refused if it would break the site — two pages claiming one address, a redirect that loops, JavaScript that does not parse. The site stays exactly as it was and you are told what is wrong.

It warns rather than blocks on things that might be deliberate: no homepage, a site with no pages, a CSS variable that names nothing. A validator that blocks on taste becomes a thing people learn to fight.

Publish history

It is the Releases tab of a site’s Overview. Every release is a row: when it went out, what changed in it, and what each page looked like. You can restore a page from any of them, or put a single setting back, without undoing everything else that has happened since.

Releases are kept for a year. Page content is kept indefinitely, which is what makes a year of restores real.

Preview and View live

Preview builds from your drafts — it is what the site would look like. View live opens the real address, and it is only a link when something is actually published there. If it is not a link, the reason is written beside it.