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Preview, history and scheduling

These are the tools that answer one question: what happened to this page, and can I undo it?

They exist so a mistake is recoverable — but a person who does not know Restore exists experiences a mistake as unrecoverable anyway. This page is the half of the safety model that only helps if you have read it.

All of them live on the post's own edit screen, in the sticky bar at the top: Preview Draft · Translations · History · Schedule · Save.

Draft and published​

Every post has two states, and it can be in both at once:

  • Draft — the working copy. Saving writes here.
  • Published — what visitors see.

Editing a published post changes only its draft; the live page keeps serving the published version until something publishes the new one. That is why nothing you type in the console reaches the site by accident, and it is the premise all five tools below rest on.

Today publishing happens through the Universal Editor's Publish button, or by approving an agent run in Agent Review. See Letting an agent in for how a run is approved.

Preview a draft before anyone else sees it​

Preview Draft on the post's edit screen opens the page as it will look, drafts included, in a new tab.

What happens depends on where the site's front end is:

  • Shio renders the site itself — the preview opens straight away. The console session you are already signed in with is the authorization, and no credential is minted.
  • The site has an external front end (a Next.js app, say) — Shio mints a short-lived preview token, confined to that one site, and opens the front end's preview route carrying it.

A minted preview link is good for 15 minutes by default, and never more than an hour. That is the whole point of it: a link you paste into a chat should stop working before it can be forwarded somewhere you did not intend.

An expired link is not a broken product. If a reviewer says the link no longer works, click Preview Draft again and send a fresh one.

The token is preview-scoped and site-scoped: it can read that one site's drafts and nothing else. It cannot write, and it cannot reach another site.

An operator can change the lifetime, or turn preview links off entirely, in configuration:

shio.cda.preview.enabled=true
shio.cda.preview.ttl-seconds=900
shio.cda.preview.max-ttl-seconds=3600

If preview is switched off, the button is quietly unavailable rather than failing.

History: what changed since the last publish​

History on the post's edit screen compares the draft (working copy) against the published (live) version, field by field.

The dialog opens with the answer in its header:

  • "N field(s) changed since last publish"
  • "No changes since last publish"
  • "Not yet published — nothing to compare"

Below it, each field is listed with its draft value, its published value, and a status: changed, added or removed. Only changes hides the fields that are the same in both, which is what you want on a post type with forty fields and two edits.

It also tells you who — the draft's last modifier, and who published the live version.

Restore the published version​

Restore published version throws away the draft's changes and makes the draft match what is live again. It is the undo for "I edited this and it was worse."

It asks twice: the first click arms it ("Discard draft changes — click again to confirm"), the second does it.

It does not touch the live page. Restore is about the working copy; the published version was never in danger.

Schedule a publish or an unpublish​

Schedule on the post's edit screen sets two optional instants:

FieldEffect
Publish atThe draft goes live at this time.
Unpublish atThe live version comes down at this time.

Either can be set without the other, and leaving a field empty means no schedule. Clear removes one that is already set.

A scheduled post shows "Scheduled for …" so the state is visible without opening the dialog.

The transition fires within a minute of the chosen time. A background sweep runs every 60 seconds and applies whatever has come due, so nobody has to be at a keyboard at midnight — but do not schedule against a deadline finer than a minute.

The audit trail​

Administration → Activity answers "who did that": every create, update, publish, unpublish, delete and restore, with the name of whoever made it and when.

It covers every surface — the console, the CLI, the delivery API and an agent — so a change made by something that never opened a browser is attributed the same way as one you typed yourself.

For an agent's work specifically, Agent Review is the better screen: it groups a run's changes together so you can approve or revert the run rather than reading it one row at a time.

See Administration § Activity.

The trash​

Deleting is reversible. A deleted post or folder is marked deleted rather than removed, disappears from the console and the site, and can be restored from Content → Trash. Nothing expires it on a timer; purge is the only permanent act.

The details — what one restore puts back, and why a folder delete is a single row in the trash — are on The content console § The trash.

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