Revisions and Publishing
A document has a draft and a live revision, and every save adds to its history.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Layout & Pages:
- Page Builder — documents, revisions and publishing
- Pages — the site’s page structure
Five kinds of revision
- Autosave — while you work.
- Manual — when you save deliberately.
- Publish — what went live.
- Import — brought in from elsewhere.
- Restore — going back to an earlier state.
Autosave does not fill your history
Deliberately. An autosave overwrites a single row per document and author rather than appending, so a day of editing does not produce four hundred revisions.
Which means autosave protects you from losing work but is not a history. If you want a point you can come back to, save manually.
Save a manual revision before anything substantial
The habit that matters. Before restructuring a page, before a large rewrite, before trying something — one manual save with a note gives you a definite point to return to.
Notes are worth writing
Each revision can carry one. "Before the pricing rewrite" is worth far more six weeks later than a timestamp, and the list of revisions is otherwise indistinguishable rows.
Saving is not publishing
The draft revision is what you are editing; the live revision is what visitors see. They move independently, so you can work on a page for a week while the current one stays up.
This is also the answer to "I changed it and nothing happened".
Publishing can be scheduled
A document carries a publish-from and publish-until, and a scheduled status. So a page can go live at a date and come down at another without anybody being there.
Useful for anything with a date attached — a campaign, a notice, a seasonal page — and it removes the risk of a page that should have been withdrawn staying up.
Archived keeps the content
An archived document is out of circulation without being destroyed. Prefer it to deletion; a page you might need again, or might be asked about, is worth keeping.
Documents can be locked
A document records who has it locked and when. That is what stops two people editing the same page and one silently losing their work.
If a page is locked by somebody who has gone home, that is a person to ask rather than a fault.
Worked example
A team saves a manual revision with a note before any substantial change, and schedules seasonal pages to publish and unpublish on dates. A restructure that went wrong was reverted to a noted revision in under a minute.
Recommendations
- Manual save with a note before anything substantial.
- Remember autosave is not history.
- Schedule dated pages to publish and withdraw.
- Archive rather than delete.