Document Publish Screen

Approve and publish content

Versioned content can be approved and published to the web (made publicly visible).

Having the right to publish depends on your role. If you are an Author, you may request approval of your content, and the responsible Editor will review it.  In order to publish you need at least an Editor role.

Since the allowed actions depend on the role you play, the Publish screen interface changes accordingly. Authors and Editors see different controls.

Fig. 1.  Document publish screen for an Editor.

Author requests approval

There are two ways to request approval, in the content Publish screen of a document, and via a bulk operation in the Publish screen of a Folder or Publication.

The advantage of using the Publish screen of a document is an Author can include a message that is received by the Editor. Likewise, the Editor can reply if for some reason the request is rejected. If Silva is setup with an Email Message Service, these messages will be sent by email, including an automatic link to the corresponding location. When using the Publish screen of a container, an automatically generated message is sent to the other party.

The following steps describe the process for an Author.

1. Go to the Publish screen of a content object.
2. The “Publish time” can filled in, as well as an “Expiration time”. See the section on publish time below for an explanation.
3. Click the request approval button (alt-r) to send the approval request to the responsible Editor. Please check the feedback on the returning page regarding the success or failure of sending your request.
4. If the Editor approves or rejects your request, you will be notified. At any time in between you can redraw your request by visiting the object and clicking the revoke approval button (alt-v).

In the content Publish screen the “Content publish time” and “Expiration time” are optional. When setting an expiration, remember to turn it on (like an alarm clock).

Editor publishes content

1. Go to the Publish screen. (Fig. 1)
   
2. Fill in a publication date, or check the “Publish right now” checkbox, which will use the current time as publish date. If necessary, fill in an expiration date and set it by checking “Set expiration time?”.
3. Click the approve button (alt-o, for ‘open’).
4. Check the returning screen for success or failure of your approval.
5. Any time after approval you can intercept the publication via the revoke approval button (alt-v). In this case it's a good idea to do this via the content Publish screen, since you can fill in a message in the “Message to author(s)” textarea to inform the author about the reason for the revocation.
6. Alternatively you can close public content via the close (alt-c) button if you decide it should taken offline.

Notes

• You can make new versions of closed content later on.
• Authors may make editable copies to work on.
• The difference between revoking approval and closing is that the link (re)coloration indicates a problem with the document. If approval is revoked, the link turns red. Closed documents turn gray, which denotes the normal end of the life cycle of that version.

Reading information in the document Publish screen

If you want to check the condition of the content, you'll find the same information in the document Publish screen as in the listing in the folder Publish screen. The difference is any messages concerning the content are displayed in the content Publish screen. This does not depend on your role; the information is always visible.

Publication and expiration date

If your content is approved, it will become publicly visible only within the time frame between publish time and expiration time. If you do not give an expiration date, the published content will remain public forever, or until someone closes it. Note that you have to check the “Set expiration time?” time checkbox when you want to set an expiration date, otherwise the expiration date will be ignored.

Versioning of documents

Once content is published a new version can be created. The published version stays online for the public, while the editable version can be worked on, or approved with a publication date in the future.

Once published, content cannot be reverted back to an editable state. The content can only be closed, which takes it offline, or a new version can be created.