Publish versions of content

Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) (SaaS) has sophisticated support for advanced content creation and publishing management involving multiple editors. The draft concept is central, ensuring that work-in-progress is never externally exposed until it is actively published. Your publishing options depend on the content status and access rights. Available actions, content status, and notifications are indicated in the status bar at the top.

Publishing involves creating a draft, publishing the final version, and managing versions. The steps apply to different types of content, such as pages, shared blocks, media, experiences, and elements.

See Control the publishing process.

When you create or update content, you can perform a number of actions to create drafts, undo changes, set content ready for review, publish directly or schedule publishing at a later stage, and so on.

Whenever you create new content or edit existing content, a draft version is automatically created. 

New content is not publicly available on the application until you publish it. Changes to content properties are immediately autosaved by the system. Versioning is not used for drafts, which means that you and other editors can work on the same draft over time but still have only one version of the draft.

You can preview content appearance using the Preview mode option in the top toolbar. You can also preview content by language, audience, or display channel if these are used on your application; see Preview an experience.

You can also compare different content versions by using the Compare version option in the top toolbar; see Compare versions.

When done editing, click Publish at the top and then Publish (or Publish Changes, if you are editing previously published content). The content is immediately published and publicly available on the application, provided that no access restrictions apply. Click View on website to view the content as it displays on the application.

You can also republish an older version of a page.

If you want to publish the page at a later time, see Schedule for later publishing in this article.

The time for publishing is determined by the local time zone of the editor who publishes or schedules a page. This means that if you are working as an editor in London, UK, and you want to publish page A at 8 AM New York time and page B at 8 AM Tokyo time, you need to find out what the corresponding time is in London. In this example, you would have to publish page A at 1 PM and page B at midnight UK time.

If you do not have publishing access rights, or if you want your changes to be approved by someone else before publishing, use the Ready to Publish option to mark the content as ready for approval and publishing. Withdraw and Edit lets you take back content for further editing after sent for approval.

If your application is set up to use content approvals, your content may have to be approved by one or more approvers before it can be published. In that case, you do not have the Publish option, and you have to set the content to Ready for Review when you are done. Doing this starts the approval sequence. When all approvers have approved the content, you are notified and you can publish the content or schedule it for late publishing. See Approve content.

If you are an appointed reviewer for a content item, you can approve changes for the content item when it is in status Ready for Review and at the approval step where you were set as reviewer. You can also decide to decline the changes, in which case the content version status is set to Rejected. This does not mean that the latest changes disappear, only that the content needs to be edited and reviewed again before it can be approved and published. You can monitor content status and related tasks in Tasks in edit view in Control the publishing process.

If you have Administer rights to the content item, you can also approve the entire approval sequence and also cancel the review request.

See Approve content for information.

If you have publishing access rights, you can schedule the publishing to occur at a later time. Select the Schedule for Publish option and set the date and time when you want the content (new or updated) to be published. This applies to both newly created content and changes to existing content.

Content that is scheduled for publishing is locked for editing. Select the Remove Scheduling and Edit option to interrupt the scheduled publishing and continue editing the selected version.

Selecting New Draft from Here creates a new draft, based on the scheduled version, which is still published at the scheduled time. You can continue working on the new draft, and apply publishing actions for this, as desired. An advanced scenario would be to apply multiple publishing occasions for different versions of a campaign page, having them replace each other in a desired order.

If you need to backtrack and use an older version of a page or if you are managing multiple language versions, there are a number of tasks you can perform from the version list by using the options menu (...) at the bottom of the Versions gadget. See also Compare versions of content for information on working with versions.

Click the column headers to sort the version list according to language, status, and more.

Content can have the following status in the version list:

The primary draft is the draft presented in edit view, when accessing the content. Multiple drafts may exist, by default the latest saved edited version is the primary draft.

Use the Set as Primary Draft option in the version list to make another draft the primary one.

A content item that is not published can have only one draft. You can create multiple drafts from published versions; each draft is editable individually, and you can schedule them for publishing at different times. There is no versioning of drafts, so there is only one version of each draft.

The content version selected in the version list is loaded into the editing area, from where you can edit the content or perform other available publishing actions.

Select the Delete Version option to delete a version. Content versions are not supported by trash management. So, when you delete a version in the versions gadget, the version is permanently deleted.

If the selected content exists in multiple languages, language versions are displayed with a language code. To filter versions for a desired language, select Show Content in Current Language Only in the version list.

You can only republish a previously published version if no approval sequence has been defined on the content item. To republish a previously published version, select the desired version from the Versions gadget and click Republish from the Options menu. For traceability reasons, a new version with a new timestamp is created when you republish content, even if no changes were made.

If an approval sequence is defined, you must select New Draft from Here, set the new draft to Ready for Review and then let the draft be approved before it can be published.

You can manually create a draft from a previously published version or from a version that is scheduled for publishing at a later time. Select Options > New Draft from Here and publish the previous version of the content. You can edit the latest draft by selecting Edit Primary Draft.

Unpublished content in CMS is content that is not yet published or content that you for some reason do not want publicly visible on the application.

There is no Unpublishing option in the user interface; instead, you have the following options to hide published content from being publicly visible on your application:

When you start to edit content, the content is marked as currently being edited notifying other editors to avoid version conflicts.

Even if content is marked as being edited, another editor can select the Edit Anyway option, and continue working with the draft.

The currently being edited markup setting is automatically cleared after some time. To keep this setting, you can set a permanently being edited markup through the All properties editing view by selecting Tools > Permanently Mark as Being Edited. This setting remains until manually disabled (toggle the setting to disable).