My client is trying to publish a blog post, and the option to publish is greyed out. I’m currently working on the site and making changes, so can’t publish the whole site as it’s nowhere near ready yet. The blog post is time sensitive, and my client is asking me to find a solution.
I’ve looked at the restrictions to see why it might not be working, and here’s my answer to those restrictions:
Your site hasn’t been published
It has been published and is live, just without the new changes made. The structure of the Collection for that item (or a referenced item) has changed
I don’t think this is the case. I’ve not changed anything for the blog section that this is posting to. I have created two new CMS collections, but they aren’t connected to the section this post will be appearing in. Would this make a difference? You have multiple domains published at different times
Multiple domains for the same site? This isn’t the case; the site only has one domain. The item’s references create circular dependencies (for example, a blog post has an author, the author has a client, and the client has a blog post)
I don’t understand what this is referring to. Could this be the issue?
If I publish the site to the holding site, the blog post shows there, but like I say, I can’t publish the whole site as it’s not ready yet. Also, the checkbox for the live site under ‘Choose Publish Destination’ isn’t ticked for the live site (only the .webflow.io version). Would this make a difference?
I would love to share the read-only link, but the information I’m adding is sensitive so I can’t. Could anyone shed some light on my issue?
It’s because of this restriction:
“You have multiple domains published at different times”
This includes the webflow staging domain (what you are calling the ‘holding site’).
Yes, it’s quite a headache but it’s how Webflow works at this point in time. You cannot publish individual CMS items if the staging domain and the live domain were not last published at the same time.
For your current situation, you’ll need to either figure out a way to wrap up what you’re working on, at least to a safe point where things can be published even if not everything is complete OR you’ll need to hold off on publishing that new blog post.
Thanks for getting back to me. Yeah, this is what I was told by Webflow, and they suggested that I unpublish the staging site to see if that would allow me to post the CMS content. I did this, and even though it now says the post is published, it’s not showing on the live site. I’ve reached out to ask what to do next.
It’s frustrating, as I need to make changes to the site content without updating the live site, and my client still needs to add blog posts. They also need to see my progress for sign off so publishing the staging site was necessary (I’ve used similar functionality with different site builders, and it worked as intended). It seems like it’s a bit of an oversight for this functionality to be an issue; I hope it can be resolved.
Thank you for your input though; it’s much appreciated.
I’ve never found a satisfactory solution for this.
In fact, it used to be that a client could publish a blog post and that publishing would actually publish the whole site including unfinished pages.
I think this near feature might be a way to try to prevent that kind of catastrophe.
The approach I take is to always keep live client sites in a ready-to-publish state.
Build new features on hidden draft pages
Use the setting visibility hidden to remove sections that are not yet ready for publish
Make smaller, progressive changes where possible rather than massive redesigns that render the site unpublishable for a month.
Not much else you can do but make certain you can hit publish all easily when needed.
