Publishing content

Note

This section describes the djangocms-versioning package used by the django CMS quickstart project. Because django CMS is modular, other installations may offer different version states and actions, or no version history.

Once you have finished filling in your newly created page (or blog post), it is saved as a draft. It will not be published until you decide to do so. As an editor, you can view drafts, but any site visitors will only see published pages.

To publish a page, click on the highlighted “Publish” button in the toolbar. This button is visible in the page’s edit mode. (If there is a highlighted “Edit” button instead, click it first to get to edit mode.)

When published you will be taken to the published page or the “manage versions” dialog, depending on the setup of your site. If you’re taken to the manage versions dialog, click on the eye button of the top listed version to get back to the page you just published.

You will see in the toolbar that the version menu now shows that the content is “published”.

Version states

Since django CMS 4, pages and other publishable content can have more than the two states “draft” and “published”.

Note

Versioning is managed by an optional package like django CMS Versioning. Your installation might manage versions differently. This guide assumes that django CMS Versioning is installed.

The version you just published is in the “published” state — it is the one your visitors see, and it can no longer be changed. To make further changes you create a new draft from it with the “New Draft” button; when you publish that draft, the version you published today becomes “unpublished” and is kept as a record. A draft you want to set aside without publishing can be archived.

All four states, and the actions each of them allows, are listed in the version states reference.

Looking back at what changed

Published and archived versions remain in the version history, so you can compare them or restore their content. Drafts that you discard or delete cannot be recovered. Open the version menu in the toolbar and select “Manage versions…” to see the retained history of the page you just published:

Working with that history — comparing, reverting and discarding versions — is covered step by step in Managing versions.

That completes the tutorial: you have logged in, found your way around the toolbar and the page tree, uploaded an image, created a page, filled it with content and published it. From here, the how-to guides cover the everyday tasks, and the concepts explain why django CMS works the way it does.