Drafts, publishing and scheduling

Every content item has a status, and only one action changes what visitors see: publishing.

The four statuses

Edits wait for you

Edits save on the item, not on the site. A published post keeps its live version until you publish again, so you can make many small edits without rebuilding the site after each one. When you are done, Publish changes sends them all at once.

Drafts always save, even if a field holds a value the site can't use. The check happens when you publish.

Publishing

Publishing writes the item into your site's code and rebuilds the site. It runs in the background, and the item shows "Publishing…" until it is live, usually within a few minutes.

If your business is drafting (changes collect on a private draft until someone publishes the site), publishing an item can instead stage it on the site draft. It then goes live with the next site Publish, along with everything else on the draft. When other unpublished site changes are waiting, the confirm dialog lets you choose between staging the item and publishing the whole site now.

Publishing from chat always asks you to confirm first, because it changes your public site.

Field checks before publishing

One invalid value in one item could break the whole site's build, so publishing checks every field against the collection's rules first. If something is wrong, publishing is refused with "Fix these fields before publishing." and the problems appear on the fields themselves, for example "This field is required." Fix them in the editor, or ask Willo to, and publish again.

Scheduling

You can schedule an item to publish at a future time. Scheduling is done in chat: "publish the autumn menu post on 1 November at 9am". The Content tab shows the item as Scheduled, and Willo publishes it within a few minutes of that time. Setting the schedule counts as your confirmation, so nothing asks again when it fires. If your business is drafting at that moment, the item lands on the site draft and waits there until someone publishes the site.

If the item's fields stop passing the checks before then (for example because the collection's fields changed), it is held, still scheduled, and publishes as soon as the fields are fixed. Cancelling a schedule returns the item to its previous status.

Unpublishing and deleting

• Unpublish takes the item off the live site and keeps it in the Content tab as a draft. The dialog tells you what happens to its address. Often the page stops working and returns "not found", which matters for a post with traffic or links pointing at it. Depending on the collection, the old address may instead redirect to the collection's main page, or the page may stay up but drop out of listings. Read the dialog before you confirm.
• Delete removes the item for good. A published item is taken off the site first. There is no undo.

Either way, an item in a page-less collection simply disappears from wherever the site showed it.

Related: Who publishes content, Schedule a post.