Versions of a guide
You change a guide that is live. Something breaks. Now what?
With versions: you open last week's and press Publish. Visitors are back on the one that worked, and you never had to remember what you changed.
Trying something new takes no courage either. Duplicate the guide, write in the copy, show it to a colleague — all the while, visitors keep getting what was there before. You decide when, and whether, it is swapped.
Try it here, nothing can break
- Press the row Before the rules changed. It opens in the editor.
- Change the question. The panel on the right stays folded away — what you write does not reach visitors, and you are not in what they read.
- Press Publish on the row. Only now does the panel unfold.
The versions
The editor
What a visitor sees
Rendered from the published version. Write in any other row and it never reaches here. Save into the published one and it arrives at once — which is why it is worth knowing which row you are in.
Two things worth knowing
Two marks, and nothing else to learn. Published is what a visitor gets. Open is where your typing lands. They are rarely the same row, and that is the point.
The note is yours. Write down why you kept a version —
before the rules changed
— and in six months you will know which
one to go back to. A visitor never sees it.
This page remembers in your browser. In your own system the versions live wherever you already keep things — a file archive, a database, the CMS — and somebody wires that up once: eight functions, and the list never learns which of them it got. There are worked examples to copy from, and the list is under What your page owns.