Preview and publish a website

Walk through the whole draft as a reader would, share it for sign-off, and publish when it's ready. You can always go back.

Readers only ever get what you've published. Everything else you do in Halo CMS is a draft, so you can change as much as you like without anyone seeing it half done.

See the whole website

Preview, under Website in the sidebar, shows the draft with its links working. Follow them, type an address, or use back and forward. Check it at a phone's width with the buttons at the top: on most public websites, that's what most readers have.

If a link leads nowhere you get told so, instead of landing on a blank page.

To get sign-off from someone without a Halo account, choose Share a preview, pick when the link expires (in 1, 7 or 30 days) and choose Make link. They can read the website without signing in.

It's a copy of the draft as it is now, so what they approve is what they saw. Later changes need a new link.
Copy the address when it's shown. Halo keeps only a fingerprint of it, so it can't show it again.
Search engines are told to leave it out. To stop a link before it expires, choose Turn off on its row: it stops working within about a minute, for good.

Publish

Publish says what has changed since the last release, then checks the website. Each finding says why it matters, with a link to where you fix it.

Most of them are advice, and you can publish anyway: you know your own deadline. Only something that would really break the website stops you, such as having no home page, or a data source whose answers you couldn't make public. The checks also say when a report block's report is in the Trash, isn't published or lost its embed link, and when a data source's dataset is in the Trash.

Publishing takes a few seconds. Readers get the new version within a minute, without anyone clearing a cache.

A website needs an address for anyone to reach it. One website answers at your Halo address, and the first to go live takes it if nobody else is using it. If another website has it and this one has no domain, Publish says so, and you can connect a domain or move your Halo address under Domains.

Publish later

Choose Publish later in the Publish dialog and pick a time, in your organization's time zone. It publishes the draft as it is at that moment, including anything changed between now and then. You can call it off from the same dialog, and publishing by hand replaces it. If it can't go out, because you can no longer publish for example, Halo tells you and readers keep the last release. In Halo Data, Settings, Schedules lists every website set to publish.

Go back

Releases lists what you've published. Choose Restore on any of them, and readers get it again within a minute. Its pages aren't rebuilt, and your drafts stay as they are. A publish set for later is called off, and the dialog says so.

If the release has data sources, restoring it makes their numbers public again, so it takes what publishing them takes, as you are now: you need to be able to open each dataset. Its sources are asked again, so readers get today's numbers under today's rules, not the ones it was published with. From then on, its refreshes run as you.

Halo keeps the last 20 releases, and whichever one is live.

To go back on a single page instead, open History in its settings and choose Restore. That only changes your draft, and Undo takes it back.

Take a website offline

Under Settings, Take it offline stops readers reaching it within a minute. Nothing is deleted, and publishing puts it back. A publish set for later is called off, and one on its way stops, so it stays offline until someone decides otherwise. Going back to an earlier release calls them off too.