Publishing your work
In this chapter, you've been working on your Plone site as a logged in user. The pages that you've created will appear in the top navigation tabs. However, try logging out and then finding the pages you've created—the navigation tabs for your pages aren't there anymore! Before the outside world can see your pages, you must publish them.
You may have noticed that when you view your pages (when logged-in), they are labeled Private. By default, when you create new pages, they are considered private. This allows you to work on a page "behind-the-scenes." Then, when you are ready to display the page publicly, you need to publish it.
Publishing a page
To publish a page, you should first, navigate to the page that you wish to publish. Note the State menu item on the rightmost side of the green toolbar. Click on this menu item and select Publish from the drop-down list.
Note
For now, you can ignore the Submit for publication and Advanced options in the State drop-down menu. These functions will be covered in subsequent chapters of this book. If you do not see the Publish option, it is probably because you are not logged in as an administrator. The default workflow assumes that non-administrators have to get their work reviewed by a reviewer before it can be published. You will learn more about workflow and the State tab in subsequent chapters.
That's all there is to it. Now if you log out of your site, you should see the page you've just published, available as a navigation tab.
Publishing multiple pages
In the previous section, you learned how to publish a single page. You can also publish multiple items in a directory at once, rather than one at a time. This can be done through the Contents tab for the folder.
First, navigate to the folder in which there are pages that you wish to publish. Then click on the Contents tab on the green toolbar. Note that the publishing state is indicated by color—Red is private content, and blue is published content. Select the checkboxes next to the content that you want to publish and then click on the Change State button below the folder contents list.
You are then taken to the Publishing process page. There are several things that you can do here, but for now, look at the bottom of the page. Select the Publish option, and click on Save to continue.
Publishing a folder
Let's say you want to publish a folder that contains other content items. Plone gives you the choice of publishing only the main folder, or all of the contents of the folder as well. Here is an example of this latter scenario:
Here we have a folder called Another Section, and a second folder within it called A Subsection. We wish to publish both Another Section and the folder contained within it.
First, navigate to one level above the folder that you want to publish. In this case it's the home page or the root level of the site. Then click on Contents in the toolbar to see a listing of all of the content items. Note that the text of Another Section is colored red, to indicate that is in a private state.
Select the checkbox next to Another Section and then click on Change State button. You should now see the Publishing process page, as shown in the following screenshot:
Note the checkbox labeled Include contained items. By selecting this checkbox, you can choose to have all of the contained content items published along with the main folder you are publishing. To finish, choose Publish at the bottom of the page and click on Save.
You can check the results by clicking on the folder you have just published. The folder and all of its contained items should now be displayed as published items, in the familiar blue text color, as shown in the following screenshot:
