Drafts and publishing

Writing in DocSpade and publishing a site are separate. Saving an article never changes what your readers see. Readers only see a change when you publish the site.

This is what lets you write freely and publish when you are ready.

Three states

State	Who sees it	Where it lives
Draft	Only you	Your private copy of an article
Saved for publishing	Your team, in the editor	The article as it will appear in the next site update
Live site	Your readers	The documentation site as it was last published

Draft

A draft is your own working copy. It is private, and it is never included when the site is published. Each person has their own draft of an article, so two people can work on the same article without getting in each other’s way.

Saved for publishing

When you save an article for publishing, your changes replace the article’s current version and your draft is removed. The article is now ready to go into the next site update. Readers still do not see it.

If someone else saved a newer version while you were editing, DocSpade does not let you overwrite their work without noticing, and your editor returns to the latest version.

Live site

Publishing a site takes the articles that have been saved for publishing, together with the navigation, the look of the site and its home page, and turns them into a new version of the site. When the new version is ready it replaces the old one automatically. Until then the old version stays live. If building the new version fails, the old version stays live.

Why an article might not appear on the site

An article is included in the site when:

It has been saved for publishing at least once. An article that only exists as a draft is never included.
It is in the navigation. Articles that are not in the navigation are not listed on the site.

A group in the navigation that has no published articles inside it is left out.

The navigation is the menu readers use to move around a site. You arrange it as a tree of groups, articles, links to other websites, and dividers. Navigation has its own Save navigation action, separate from saving an article.

Limits

A knowledge base can only be published a limited number of times in any 24 hours. If you reach the limit, wait and publish again later. A publish that fails to build does not count towards the limit.

Who can do what

Action	Needs
Write, save a draft, save for publishing, change navigation	Editor or higher on the knowledge base
Publish the site	Publisher on the knowledge base, or an owner or admin