Quillet
Menu
Menu

Publishing and history

6 min read

Publish a document from the dashboard after reading what else the publish changes, take it down again with Unpublish, and use History to read, compare and restore any earlier version.

Why publishing tells you what it changes first

In Quillet, saving and publishing are two separate acts. Every save keeps a version, and no version reaches readers until someone publishes it. That gives you a safe place to work, but it puts weight on the moment you publish, because one press can change more than the document in front of you. A banner shared by twenty pages changes all twenty. An English page with no German translation is also what German readers get.

So the publish dialog says what will happen before anything does. History keeps every version, so a mistake that did go live is one restore and one publish away from being undone. Versions and publishing explains the model behind both.

What Publish, Unpublish and History do

Publish

Publish in the page bar makes the version you last saved the one readers get, for this document in this locale. It is unavailable in two cases, and says why under the button: while you have unsaved changes ("Save first"), and before the document has ever been saved ("There is nothing saved to publish yet.").

The dialog, Publish this document?, names the document and the locale. For a moment it says "Checking what this changes…", and then it lists what the publish does:

  • "Version 4 goes live for readers." Or, if that version is already live, "Version 4 is already live. Publishing again changes nothing."
  • "Readers in de-DE get this version too: that locale has no published translation of its own." You see this line when you publish the default locale and other locales fall back to it.
  • "It also updates 2 live documents that use this one:", followed by a list, such as pages/about (en-US) and pages/home (en-US). These are published documents that include this one by reference, so they change along with it. Each one opens in a new tab. A long list stops after the first 50 and ends with "and 12 more".
  • "Publishing would be refused:", followed by the reasons, each with a link to the document it is about. The most common reason is a reference to a document that has never been published, which reads, for example, Publish "components/banners/spring" first. Publish stays unavailable until you fix every reason.

If someone saves the document while the dialog is open, the publish is refused, because you would be publishing a version you have not seen. Refresh summary reads the document again.

Unpublish

On a published document, Publishing actions (the ⋮ beside Publish) holds Unpublish. Its dialog tells you what readers get instead:

  • For the default locale: "Readers will get a 404 for this document until it is published again."
  • For a translation: "Readers will get the en-US version, or a 404 if there is none."

Unpublishing keeps every version. The document goes back to Draft, ready to be published again.

History

History in the page bar opens a sheet that lists every version of the document in this locale, newest first. Each row shows the version number, when it was saved, who saved it ("you" for your own saves), the change note, and Published on the version readers get. A version that came from another environment says so, such as "Promoted from staging (v3)".

View on a row opens that version, read-only. The bar above it says which version you are viewing and which is the current draft, for example "Viewing v1 — the current draft is v3", and offers:

  • Back to draft: return to the latest version.
  • Compare with draft: show this version and the current draft side by side.
  • Restore as new draft: save this version's content again as the newest version.

How to

Publish a change

  1. Save the document. The status reads Draft or Changed since published.
  2. Press Publish.
  3. Read the dialog to the end: the version, the other locales, and every document listed under "It also updates".
  4. Open any listed page you are unsure about. Each one opens in a new tab.
  5. Press Publish in the dialog. The status now reads Published.

Publish several documents

The dashboard publishes one document in one locale at a time. To make a page and the banner it uses go live together, publish them in order:

  1. First publish the document that others use, such as the banner. A page that points at a banner nobody has published is refused until the banner is published.
  2. Then publish the page.

When several documents must go live at the same instant, ask an engineer. The command line publishes a set of documents as one release, and Promote can publish everything it moves from another environment in one step.

Take a document down

  1. Press ⋮ (Publishing actions) beside Publish.
  2. Choose Unpublish, and read what readers will get instead.
  3. Press Unpublish.

Undo a change with History

  1. Press History in the page bar.
  2. Find the version you want by its time, author and change note, and press View.
  3. Press Compare with draft to check what differs.
  4. Press Restore as new draft. The editor comes back with that content as a new version. Its change note reads "Restored v1", and the status reads Changed since published.
  5. Press Publish when you want readers to get it. A restore on its own changes nothing for them.

Limits

  • There is no scheduled publishing, no approval step and no named release. A publish happens when someone presses Publish.
  • The dashboard publishes one document in one locale per press. Publishing many at once is a job for engineers, with the command line or with Promote.
  • The "It also updates" list counts documents that include this one by reference. A page that only links to it with an ordinary link is not listed, although that link may lead readers to the change.
  • A restore is not checked against newer saves: it writes the old content on top of whatever is current. Nothing is lost, because every version stays in History, but check that nobody has saved since you started.
  • History is kept per locale. Each translation has its own versions and its own published version.
  • Readers see a publish when your site next reads the CMS, and when that is depends on how the site was built. Integrating a site describes the three ways.

Last updated