But I am still confused about what will and what will not be published.
As an Editor, who is using the actual Editor interface:
I can publish single CMS items live. Without publishing design changes
When I press the big publish button it will publish all my content changes to staging + custom domain. Does this include all changes done by the designer working in the background as well? (classes, components, layout etc.)?
The roles are confusing… My team wants to be able to publish content changes (copy, images, cms) on the go without asking for permission. Afraid of pushing design changes.
Basically in short: What does the ‘can publish’ mean if you are a content editor?
I think you’re showing settings from two different type of user access setups.
Editor access refers to the ?edit wysiwyg editor built into the published site. You can edit content, create CMS items, etc, and you can control whether or not they can publish. That’s basically it.
The bottom screenshot shows permissions within the designer itself- admin, design, editing and commenting roles. These all require designer access.
In both cases, I do not think Webflow has separate content from page design in the publishing process. If you make design changes to a CMS page, and someone publishes an updated CMS item in that collection, your design changes are also published. This has been a longstanding problem, which as far as I’m aware hasn’t been fixed. The ability to disable publishing is the only safeguard Webflow has been able to provide so far.
The best thing you can do is work around this in your publishing & design processes;
Design on separate pages or site clones for major changes that require a lot of time and testing
Use the Visibility feature to disable sections that are not complete yet, when site publishing is needed. This will let you keep changes out of the publishing flow
Keep contact with the publishing team, if they need to publish, you shelve any open design work on live site pages.
Note on all of this, I’m speaking from the perspective of standard site hosting. I understand that Enterprise plans may have entirely different access-control possibilities.
@memetican cheers for your extended reply.
I was aware of the difference between an editor and a designer. But I confusingly formatted my message…sorry about that. I thought that maybe publishing as a ‘designer editor’ vs an’ editor access editor’ has differences.
Thank you for the way of working suggestions.
We are on enterprise so working with branches could be a solution too.
Though, it baffles me that Webflow has not found a better way.
We are, as a team, basically always working simultaneously on the site. Marketeers need to ask us for permission, scared that they might publish things that are work in progress. It is annoying for both parties to be dependent like that.
If you’re on Enterprise, I’d call Webflow directly [ Enterprise support perk ] and talk to their team about how to resolve that. Yes branching may be your primary option.
Another is to simply not use the wysiwyg Editor, and setup integration with an external CMS that gives you content controls… Contentful, Sanity, etc. It would be some dev work, but would ensure that only one item would be published at a time, through the API and prevent full-site publishes by the content team. As long as they stay in the CMS-driven content.
If you learn anything new please share it here, this is a common issue.
