Walkthrough 1: edit and publish
Part 1 of 4 in the standalone walkthrough. Next: generate and deliver.
Four states are easy to confuse. Keep them apart:
| State | Where it lives | Who can read it |
|---|---|---|
| Saved draft | A version of the entry in the CMS | Editors, and a verified preview |
| Published in CMS | The entry’s published version in the CMS | Anyone, through the CMS public API, at once |
| Generated source | A commit in your repository | Nobody. Source serves nothing |
| Deployed website | Your Worker, database and site, built from one commit | Your visitors |
Save a draft
Section titled “Save a draft”Edit an entry and save. Saving creates a new version. Nothing public changes. A preview renderer, if you configured one, can show the draft to a signed-in editor (preview).
Publish
Section titled “Publish”Publish the entry. The CMS public API serves the published version immediately. The toast says “Published. It is public now.” The standalone API and statically built pages do not change: they serve what they were built from until you deploy again. Blog routes, search and pages with Latest entries read the CMS on each request, so the entry shows there at once.
Unpublishing is the same: the CMS public API and those routes stop serving the entry at once. The standalone API and statically built pages keep it until the next deployment.
What decides the next deployment
Section titled “What decides the next deployment”Settings → Source & delivery shows Out of date when models, published content or the accepted theme changed since the last successful deployment. That is the only signal that publishing has not reached the standalone API and statically built pages yet.
Next: generate and deliver.
Unreleased / pre-MVP; no stable version
Source revision: fe23db481c422b40e317b92fc98116b4c0c26a87 (modified checkout)
Build date (UTC): 2026-10-18T09:22:34.630Z
Upgrade target: unavailable: modified checkout. Release notes