Drafts and live pages
Why every change is a draft first, what readers see, and exactly what publishing copies to the live site.
Docup separates what you are working on from what readers see. Understanding this one idea explains most of the dashboard.
Two versions of every page#
Each page keeps a draft and a live version. The draft is what the editor shows. The live version is a copy made the last time you published. Readers, search engines, the sitemap, llms.txt and Ask AI use only the live version.
| Draft | Live | |
|---|---|---|
| Text | What you see in the editor | The text from the last publish |
| Path | Where the page sits in the sidebar now | Where readers find it |
| Order | The order in the dashboard sidebar | The order on the site |
| Visible to | You, in the dashboard and Preview | Everyone |
What stays a draft#
All of these are drafts until you publish:
- Text you write or the AI rewrites.
- A page you create.
- A page you move to another folder, which changes its path.
- A new sidebar order.
- A suggestion that came from a push, until you apply it.
A page that has never been published is a Draft. A page that has is Live. A live page you have changed shows both: the Live badge, and a note that your edits go live when you publish.
What publishing copies#
Publishing copies the draft text of new or changed pages (provided they have text), as well as the draft path and order of all live pages, to the live version. It happens in one transaction, so the site never shows a half-published state, and two pages can swap paths without a moment where both claim the same address.
Pages with no text are skipped, unless they are already live and only moved or reordered. The first publish also turns the site on. After that the site stays on, even if later publishes change nothing but the order.
Publishing also:
- clears the cached copy of the site, so readers get the new pages, and
- refreshes the search index Ask AI uses.
To keep AI search indexing fast and cost-effective, workspaces are limited to 50 publishes per day.
The two cases where live changes by itself#
Docup is careful never to change what readers see without you. There is one deliberate exception. When you push to the repository, Docup rewrites the pages affected by your change. For a page that you have not edited, on a site that is already live, the new text goes live immediately, because the page is just following your code. Edited pages never change; they get a suggestion instead. Read the full rules in Keeping docs up to date.
The other case is taking pages down. Unpublishing a page or the site is immediate, because a reader should never wait for a page you want gone. See Publishing your site.
Preview#
Preview renders the draft version of the whole site at a private address that only members of your workspace can open. Use it before you publish, and to check how a moved page or a new sidebar order looks.
Why it works this way#
- Safety. AI-written text is never public until a person has read it.
- Atomic changes. A reorganized site goes live all at once.
- Consistent answers. Ask AI cites pages that exist on the site, not drafts.
- Easy rollback of scope. Unpublishing a page returns it to a draft without deleting any text.