In this lesson, we will explain how to publish and unpublish pages to make them visible to your website visitors (publish) and invisible again (unpublish).

Publishing and unpublishing

Publishing and unpublishing pages are designed to allow you to make changes to your website without immediately revealing them to your visitors. For instance, if you are working on modifying a page and have not completed it yet, you wouldn't want website visitors to see an unfinished page. You only publish a page when you are ready, and from that moment on, the changes are visible to website visitors.

Unpublishing is the opposite of publishing. Suppose you have a page where parents can sign up for a school trip. This page should only be visible shortly before the school trip, and after the trip, it should no longer be visible. Instead of deleting the page, you can unpublish it. The page will then no longer be visible to website visitors but will still exist.

In our CMS, there are two ways to publish and unpublish pages:

Method 1: Publishing and unpublishing pages via the page tree

This method is particularly useful if you have made changes to many different pages. In the page tree, you get a clear overview of all pages with modifications.

When in the page tree (see here how to navigate to the page tree), go to the page you want to publish. Then, click on the blue or gray dot behind the page. If the dot is blue, it means the page has already been published, but there are changes to the page that have not been published. If the dot is gray, it means the page has never been published, and therefore, it is not visible to any website visitors. A menu will now open. Press publish to publish the page. The dot is now green, indicating that the page is published, and website visitors can now see your page.

To unpublish a page, you do the same. Click again on the dot behind the page and click on unpublish in the opened menu. The dot will now turn gray, indicating that the page is no longer visible to website visitors.

Method 2: Publishing and unpublishing pages via the page itself

This method is especially useful if you want to make a quick change to a page and publish it immediately.

Go to the page itself that you want to publish. Then, click on the large blue button with "Publish Page" in the top right corner. The page will refresh, and you will now see the version as website visitors see it. If you want to go back to editing, click on the blue edit button in the same corner.

Unpublishing is a bit trickier to find using this method. Go back to the page you want to unpublish. Then, click on "Page" in the left toolbar. A menu will open. In this menu, go to the second-to-last option, "Unpublish Page." The page will refresh, and the page is now unpublished. To check if it has really worked, look in the top right corner for "Publish the page now."