Publish & Unpublish Content from the Editor

  • Last updated on November 20, 2018 at 12:25 AM

To allow more control over the visibility of your content, we use the concept of Published vs Unpublished content (Draft).

This allows you to safely create and manage content that remains hidden from your user base until you're ready for its full release, or, be able to take an article offline if it's deemed no longer worthy of public view until you can repair it.


Publishing Content

If you can see a green Publish button, this means that you have the authority to publish. That means that if your content is in Draft mode, simply hit this button to get it into the hands of your users.

Pushing the latest changes to your users is as easy as hitting the green Publish button again if your article is already public.

Publishing content

If you instead see a green Request for Approval button, you do not have publishing permissions. Select the button to submit your changes for approval. Getting your article published will then be as easy as asking a team member, who has permission to publish, to review and publish your article.


Article Statuses

To help with showing the state of an article, when editing your content you'll now see the following informative labels: status, viewing and, should you do not have permission to publish, review status.

Status

Draft: If the status of the article is Draft, this means that no matter what, this article is not visible to your end users via the Assistant, the hosted KB, or anywhere else.

Published:  If the status is Published, this meant that it is available for reading (pending any access control you have setup).

Viewing

Revision In Progress:  This means that you're currently looking at the very latest version of the article, along with any updates that have been made to it that aren't yet made public to your audience. As soon as you make an edit to an article, it will switch to this state.

Last Published: This means that what you're currently viewing in the editor, is the version that your customers have access to (assuming the status is "published").

As Submitted for Review: This means that what you're currently viewing in the editor is a version that is ready to be reviewed and has been prepared by a Contributor on your team who does not have publishing permissions. If you have publishing permissions, review their changes and publish or edit the article accordingly.

Review Status 

This status is only visible to Contributors without publishing permissions.

Pending Approval: This means that you have selected "Request for Approval", and that the article is ready to be reviewed by someone on your team with publishing permissions.

Review Withdrawn: This means that you have selected "Request for Approval" and then decided to withdraw the request in order to make changes by clicking "Edit Article".


Unpublishing Content

If you have publishing permissions, you also have authority to unpublish content. So, if you need to unpublish content, and move it back into draft mode, you can do so by hovering over the "..." beside the Publish button to display the secondary menu, and select the "Unpublish" option.

Unpublishing content

Comparing the current revision against the latest version

If you need to compare the work that you're currently doing against the last published version, to make sure that you're actually making an improvement and not making this worse, you can quickly toggle the view to show your revision, or the last published version.

Comparing versions

Filtering content by publish status

When viewing your content dashboard, to make it easier to see what still needs to be approved for release, you can filter your content based on its publish status.

If you have publishing permissions, combine this with applying the "Has Revisions" filter and/or the "Pending Approval" filter. This will allow you to easily see what content is a work in progress, or requires review, and bulk publish content when it's ready right from the content dashboard.

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