Drafts and version history

Two different safety nets exist in this CMS, and only some collections have either of them:

• Draft vs Published — lets you save work without it going live, and preview it first.
• Version history — keeps past saves so you can restore one if a change turns out wrong.

A collection can have both, only version history, or neither. This article is the complete picture; individual collection articles call out where they stand, but this is the place to check if you're not sure.

Draft vs Published

Where this exists, every record has a status:

• Save (or Save Draft) stores your work without changing the live site.
• Publish makes it public.

Your work autosaves as you go, so you're unlikely to lose it mid-edit — autosaving is not publishing, though. The live version doesn't change until you click Publish. You can also schedule a Publish for a future date instead of doing it immediately.

Use Preview before publishing — it shows the page or record as it will actually appear, including unpublished changes, so you can catch a mistake before anyone else sees it. Check a narrow window width too; most visitors are on a phone.

To take something back off the site, change its status back to Draft.

Where this exists

Pages, News, Press Releases, Landing Pages, Committees, Magazine Articles, Awards, Research Reports and Research Report Editions all have the full Draft/Publish workflow described above.

Everything else in the CMS saves and publishes in the same action — the moment you click Save, the change is live. Most collection articles say this explicitly ("There is no draft") so you know what to expect before you save.

Version history

Separate from drafts: a record of previous saves, kept so a bad edit can be undone. A collection can have version history without having a draft state at all — the two aren't the same thing, and it's easy to assume a collection with no history to fall back on because it doesn't have visible drafts, when the opposite is sometimes true.

To use it, open the record and look for its version history — the CMS lists previous saves with a timestamp, and opening an earlier one lets you restore it as the current version. Every collection listed under Draft vs Published above keeps version history as part of that same system.

Version history without drafts — Header, Footer and Forms & Contracts

Three places have version history but no draft state — every save goes live immediately, the same as any other "no draft" collection, but a history still exists afterwards to recover from:

• Header and Footer — your site's navigation and top/bottom bands. See Header and Footer. There's no way to stage a nav change and preview it before it goes live, but if a save breaks something, the previous version is recoverable.
• Forms & Contracts — see Forms & Contracts library. This one has a naming collision worth knowing about: the Versions tab on a form (its English/Spanish/Vietnamese PDFs over time) is content you manage directly and is not what this section is about. Separately, and invisibly, the whole form record also keeps its own save history the same way Header and Footer do — a second, unrelated safety net with the same name.

No draft and no version history

Most collections have neither — a save is immediate and final, with nothing to restore if it turns out wrong. This includes ordinary day-to-day collections like Events, Documents, FAQs, Staff, Committee Members and Job Openings, among others — check that collection's own article if you're unsure.

The one to know about specifically is the homepage. Unlike Header and Footer, the Home screen (see Editing the homepage) has no version history at all. A save there is the only save in the CMS with genuinely no way back — not even the fallback Header and Footer have. Take extra care there, and finish a change in one sitting rather than leaving it half done.

Quick reference

Related

• Getting started
• Pages and the page builder
• Header
• Footer
• Editing the homepage
• Forms & Contracts library