Draft, Plan, and Schedule Content

Prismic offers three key features to aid your content workflow:

• Drafts
• Releases
• Scheduling

A draft is a document or an edit that has not been published yet.

A release is a collection of documents or edits that have not been published yet.

Scheduling allows you to set a date in the future to publish a draft or a release.

Drafts

There are three steps to publishing a document.

• Make a change to the document. Now you have a new, unsaved version.
• Save your change. Now you have a saved draft.
• Publish your change. Now your draft version is live.

Only Publishers, Administrators, and Repository Owners can publish content, but all users can edit and save drafts. (Learn more about user roles.)

Drafts are useful for collaborating. A writer can create a draft and send it to a publisher for approval.

Releases

Big changes to your website can be tricky. For instance, if you need to delete a document, you might create broken links elsewhere on your website. It’s easier if you can make changes to many documents all at once and then publish them all at the same time. That’s what a release is: a collection of drafts that you can publish at the same time. They’re especially useful for work like site maintenance or product launches.

Manage your releases in the Planned tab of the document list.

Create a release

There are two ways to create a release:

• From the document list, click on the Planned tab and then the Create a new release button.
• When editing a draft, click Publish. Then, from the drop-down menu that appears, select Publish it during a release and then Publish it during a new release.

Add a new or updated document to a release

After creating or editing a document, click Save and then Publish. This will open a dropdown menu of publishing options, including the option Publish it during a release. You can then select a release to add the document to, or create a new release.

Preview a release

If your developer has configured previews for your web app, you can preview an entire release live on your website. This is a handy feature for campaigns and product launches.

Go to the Planned tab in the document list and select your release. You will see a menu of options on the right-hand side of the screen. In the menu, click Preview on [environment]. (Learn more about previews.)

Manage multiple releases

Let’s say you want to have a document drafted in a release to be published on June 3. But you want to update the same document in another release on June 5.

Navigate to the document in the first release. Click the menu icon next to the Publish button to open a menu, and select Create a new version in another release. This will allow you to add this document to another release or create a new one.

Remove a draft from a release

If you have a new document draft in a release, and you would like to remove it from the release:

• Open the document in the release.
• Click the archive button and confirm that you want to archive it.
• Navigate to the Archived tab of the document list.
• Open your archived document.
• Click the history button.
• In the history menu, choose the most recent version and click Restore.

Your document is now available as a draft in the main Work tab of the document list.

Delete a release

Go to the Planned tab in the document list and select your release. You will see a menu of options on the right-hand side of the screen. In the menu, click Delete this release.

When you delete a release:

• New documents in the release will be archived.
• Changes to documents in the release will be archived. The original version will remain untouched.
• Documents scheduled to be unpublished will remain published.

Publish a release

To publish a release immediately, go to the Planned tab in the document list and select your release. You will see a menu of options on the right-hand side of the screen. In the menu, click Publish now and confirm.

Only Publishers, Administrators, and Repository Owners can publish content, but all users can edit and save drafts. (Learn more about user roles.)

The limits of releases

Releases can contain up to 200 documents. If you need to manage more documents, you can create multiple releases, but you should schedule their publication at least one minute apart. To avoid broken links between documents, ensure that any documents with links between them are in the same release.

Scheduling

Schedule a document

You can schedule the publication of a new document or changes to a document.

Open the document. After making your changes, click Save and then Publish. In the dropdown menu, select Publish it at a specific date and time and enter the date and time. This will create a new release with your document in it, and set the release to be published at the specified time.

Schedule a release

If you have already created a release, you can schedule the entire release to be published in the future. Go to the Planned tab in the document list and select your release. You will see a menu of options on the right-hand side of the screen. In the menu, click Schedule, enter the date and time, and confirm.