Publishing Your Document

At any point in time, each item of content in your Plone site is in a particular state. This state describes its permissions and roles within the Plone site. By having items in different states, it's possible to apply different security to each item of content. For example, sometimes an item may take a week or two to prepare and involve multiple revisions. Eventually you'll want to publish the content so that it's visible for all users and shows up in the navigation and search.

You can publish the content using the State drop-down menu located at the top right of the main navigation To publish an object, select Submit from the drop-down menu. By default you can't directly publish content, but you can submit it for review. When an item is submitted for review, it moves into the review state. This is an intermediary state between visible and published. It allows for the review of content by users of your site with the reviewer role, before it goes live for the entire world to see. After you've submitted the content, you'll notice that the content is now in the review state by looking at the box in the top-right corner. You'll also notice that in  the figure below, there's no longer an edit tab.

 NOTE If you're logged in as a manager, then you'll note there will be one extra option in the drop-down publishing list called Publish. This lets you put content straight into the published state with no intermediate step.

In the workflow drop-down list in the top-right corner, there's also an option for Advanced, which opens the state form for changing the status of an object. This form is the same as clicking the state tab. It has the following fields:

Effective Date: This is the same as the Effective Date field in the properties (see the 'Setting Document Metadata' action).

Expiration Date: This is the same as the Expiration Date field in the properties (see the 'Setting Document Metadata' section).

Comments: This includes any comments you want to make for this change in state that will be recorded in history. For example, you could enter First draft; Bob, please see second paragraph.

Change State: These mirror the choices available in the drop-down menu. For example, the options are Publish, Submit, and so on. One further option, No Change, is available if no change is necessary.

Select the change of state you'd like to occur, and click Save to commit the changes.