Publishing
Move a work from draft to published — work statuses, the guided publish flow, the three publish targets, and what readers receive.
Publishing is how your work leaves the workshop and reaches readers. PanelWave separates two ideas:
- Work status — a label (Draft, Review, Published, Archived) that organizes your library and signals where each work is in its lifecycle.
- The publish pipeline — a guided flow that validates the work, packages it into a manifest, and freezes it as a snapshot that the PanelWave reader serves to readers.
Public links, review links, public addresses, embedding and QR codes are covered in the Publishing and Sharing guide.
Work statuses
Every work has one of four statuses, shown as a badge on its card in My Works:
| Status | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Draft | Work in progress — the default for new works |
| Review | Ready for a second pair of eyes |
| Published | Finished and released |
| Archived | Retired; kept for reference |
To change a status:
- One work — use the status dropdown at the bottom of the work's card in the works list. A confirmation toast ("Status set to published") appears, and the badge updates immediately.
- Several works — select them with the checkboxes, then use the bulk action bar's status dropdown and Set status.
You can also filter the works list by status (Status: All / Draft / Review / Published / Archived) to keep an overview of what is live and what isn't.
Setting a work back to Draft or Archived only changes the label in your library; use Unpublish (see the guide) to take a public link offline.
The guided publish flow
When you publish, the CMS walks you through a four-step wizard titled Publish Work: Preflight → Environment → Options → Confirm.
Preflight Check
Validation runs automatically. The wizard summarizes errors, warnings, and info notes. Errors block publishing — each is listed with a suggestion for fixing it (see Validation). Warnings don't block you: the wizard shows "Warnings (you can proceed)". Oversized-image errors offer Optimize / Optimize all right in the wizard — the fix runs in the background and the check re-polls until the errors clear (see Optimizing oversized images). Use Re-validate after fixing other issues. When everything passes you'll see "Ready to Publish".
Select Environment
Choose the target:
- Public — anyone with the link can read it at read.panelwave.org.
- Review link — anyone with the link; stable across republishes, and you can revoke it.
- Internal preview — only your team, inside the CMS.
Details for each target, and how to share them, are in the Publishing and Sharing guide. To publish Public your team and work need a public address; the wizard tells you if one is missing.
Publishing Options
- Version Tag (optional) — a label such as
v1.0.0,beta, orfinalto identify this release later. - Create Backup — save a snapshot before publishing (recommended, on by default). A backup is what lets you restore an earlier publish.
- Send Notifications — notify your team members about the publish (on by default).
- Invalidate cache — a technical option (on by default) that clears cached copies of the work; leave it on unless support asks otherwise.
Confirm & Publish
Review the summary (work, target, tag, options) and click Publish Now. A progress screen tracks the stages.
On success the heading tells you what happened. For Public and Review link you get the reader link (copy and open), the embed code, a QR code and sharing buttons; the raw manifest URL is tucked away under Technical details. For Internal preview you get Open internal preview.
The size figures are available any time without publishing: the Metadata tab of Work Properties has a read-only Size & Content section showing the manifest size, the asset count and payload, and the total — useful for keeping an eye on a work's weight as it grows.
Publishing keeps running on the server even if you close the wizard mid-way. Reopening the wizard for the same work within a few minutes reattaches to the running publish and continues showing its progress.
If publishing fails, the wizard shows the error with a Try Again button and a Copy error details button for support requests.
What readers get
A publish freezes the work's manifest (panelwave.json) — the open-format description of your chapters, panels, graph, and settings — as a snapshot. Your artwork and audio stay in PanelWave storage and are linked from the manifest with short-lived signed URLs that are issued each time the work is opened. Later edits stay private until you publish again.
The published manifest is the lean player version of your work:
- panels are keyed by their short friendly ids (
ch1-p022), never by internal database ids; - editor-only state (layer names and sizes, lock/visibility toggles, balloon tail geometry, grid helpers), the translation-workflow data, asset-library folders, and assets that no panel uses are left out;
- strings in languages the work does not offer are dropped;
- images ship as the full-size WebP rendition (or the optimized version) and videos as the H.264 rendition, with the responsive sizes alongside.
Paywalled parts are removed from the public version on the server, so they cannot be fetched without a matching entitlement. The full-fidelity version with everything the editor needs is what the work archive contains.
Content you keep in draft inside the CMS — for example extras marked Draft (hidden from readers) — is excluded from the published manifest (see Extras).
History and restore
Work Properties → Publishing lists your latest publishes. Restore makes an earlier publish live again for readers (your editor content is not changed). It is only offered when that version is still stored and not already live, and a change can take up to 5 minutes to reach readers who already have the page cached. See the guide.