Publishing & sharing
Drafts, publishing and versions
Why editing is always safe, and what Publish actually does.
Only Publish changes what a learner sees
Everything you do in the editor writes to the draft. Learners never see the draft. You can restructure an experience over a week, mid-term, while a class is using it, and nothing they open changes until you press Publish.
The header tells you when the draft has moved ahead of what is live.
What Publish does
Publishing takes a complete snapshot of the draft — scenes, pins, contexts, blocks, links, activity setup, theme — and stores it as a new version, numbered 1, 2, 3 and so on.
A version is immutable. Publishing again does not modify version 2; it creates version 3. Nothing edits a version after the fact.
Author-only contexts and their pins are left out at this point, rather than hidden later — so they are not in the published document at all.
Version history
The status chip in the editor header opens version history: every version, when it was published and by whom, with a link to each one and the controls to preview it, serve it, copy it to a new experience or restore it over your draft. See Version history: preview, serve and restore.
Stay live, or Freeze
In the Share dialog, under When the experience changes, there are two cards:
- Stay live — everybody is served your newest published version. Publish a fix and every reader picks it up. This is how a new experience starts.
- Freeze — everybody is held on one named version, for as long as you leave it there.
⚠️ Freeze holds the whole experience, not only the embed. It is the one setting people expect to apply to one thing and it applies to everything: the embed and the link you have already given your class. Publish a correction afterwards and none of them receives it.
If what you want is one group held on one version while everyone else moves on, do not use Freeze — give that group the version's own link instead. See Sending a class to one version.
A freeze names a version, not a file, so it survives everything — including deleting the experience and restoring it from the Bin.
Anyone can open the embed, unless you turn it off
Publishing also makes the experience available at a second address, the embed — and that one opens for anybody who has the address, with no account and no sign-in. It is switched on for every experience unless you go and switch it off, in the same Share dialog under Allow embedding.
That is worth a moment's thought before you publish photographs taken inside a classroom. Turning Allow embedding off changes nothing for your own class, who use the link. See Embedding an experience in a page.
Attempts remember which version
Every attempt records the version it was taken against, so a result from March can still be read against the content that existed in March.