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Best approach to Change Ciontriol if you have Published Pages

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We have created a suite of help pages in Notion for our users, it will be part of our user portal.

I am trying to decide the best approach to change. In effect I would like a 'staging copy' that I either 'promote' to the published portal or ditch if it doesn't work.

has anyone found a good method?

Thank you

by Lizat (1.2k points)

2 Answers

0vote

polle Points90800

The best approach may be to use filters and tags with different Notion database views.

Tag the pages as published and those will show in the published page, where a linked database is filtered by published.

The same applies to all the other status you need.

by polle (90.8k points)

0vote

Lizat commented

Polle, thanks for the reply. I can't really see how it helps... the pages are not in a db. The help home page has topics presented in visual groups and some other text. Perhaps there is another way to organise things but the users shouldn't see db tables.

I have live pages that link to other pages. Any live page can't be 'switched off' as users are using them. I need to make changes and test help as a whole and them promote changes. The only way I can see to do this right now is to copy the whole help suite, make changes, note the pages that have changed and then overwrite those pages in teh live version. However, if the pages have links to other help pages that also means having to adjust all the links which will be a nightmare.

Perhaps I am missing something obvious, does anyone have other ideas?

by Lizat (1.2k points)

0vote

polle commented

That is just an approach as you asked, because there is nothing like that in Notion and will never be.

Notion is not for web development and having server like staging, development and production servers. I believe you are choosing the incorrect tool for your needs.

Now that you extended a bit the info, yes, the only way of achieving something like this is copying the complete thing over and over.

You may want to try external services like Make or Zapier to create some automations that will help you in the process.

by polle (90.8k points)

0vote

Lizat Points1150

I have found a wiki template which may help so I am going to convert some pages and see if I can make that work

by Lizat (1.2k points)

0vote

Lizat commented

My requirements are not unusual, and it seems to me that if Notion allows pages to be published, and therefore exposed to external users, we need some form of control.

My requirements are simply these:

  • all editor(s) to create & edit pages for the public help site, they see all pages
  • allow users to view published pages, unpublished are not seen
  • allow updates to pages to be developed and then published without affecting the user experience.
  • some views should only be available to the editor, others are what we want to publish
  • some properties should only visible to the editor and not the user

It's bound to be a compromise, and in a perfect world with unlimited funds, we would use a help authoring system. The second choice might be to develop a WP site, but Notion is so much simpler and quicker to use. As a very small start-up we are trying to find zero or minimal-cost solutions whilst still offering our users a good experience.

So, I will persevere. I will compromise and have a status to unpublish a page when it is being edited so that any viewer is not exposed to a half-baked edit. I have looked and believe the following is not possible but can someone confirm that currently I cannot:

  • hide specific views on a published page (but not when editing)
  • hide specific properties on a published page (but not when editing)

Thank you

by Lizat (1.2k points)

0vote

polle commented

Feel free to send the feedback to Notion directly, but one thing is asking if it is possible using Notion (it is not) and a completely different thing is what you need and feature requests.

For you question you have the answer above (please select it to mark the question as solved) and for feedback, just click the question mark at the bottom right inside Notion.

by polle (90.8k points)

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