Pages and drafts

Everything you change in the editor goes into a draft. The live site keeps serving what it served before until you publish. That is the whole model, and almost every confusing moment in the editor comes from forgetting it.

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Your draft is not the live site

Two consequences worth internalising:

• Opening the site in a normal browser tab shows the published page, not your edits. That is not a bug and it is not a caching problem. It is how you check whether publishing actually did anything.
• Your draft survives a reload, and a restart. It is held on the server, not in your browser tab. Closing the laptop does not lose the afternoon.

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Switching pages

The Page control in the top bar lists every page your site declares. Pick one and the preview loads it; your chat history stays with you, but the draft you are editing is now that page’s. Each page keeps its own undo stack, so undoing on /pricing never disturbs /about. A page marked out of date in that list has a draft that uses blocks the site no longer renders — usually because a developer changed the site’s blocks after you started editing. The Chat panel says which blocks, with a Pull this page button; see pulling one page below.

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Content shared across pages

Some blocks are one piece of content on every page that shows them — a footer, say, if your developers set it up that way. Edit it on any page and every page’s draft changes with it; undo on that page reverts all of them. The publish review lists such a block once, under Site-wide content, with the pages it affects.

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Creating a page

Ask for it: “Create an /about page”. If the site defines page templates — named structures like Campaign landing page, set up in Site settings — you can name one, and the new page arrives with those sections already in place:

“Create a /spring-sale page from the Campaign landing page template”

Deleting a page is treated as destructive: the editor stops and asks before it does it, rather than doing it and offering an undo.

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Languages

On a multilingual site the top bar carries a Language control alongside the page picker. Each language version of a page is edited as its own page — you switch to German, you edit German. Two entries in that list are not languages:

• Default — the site’s base language.
• Not language-specific — pages that exist once, in no particular language.

Asking the chat to “translate this page into German” fills the German version from the one you are on. If your site lists the languages it supports and German is not one of them, the chat asks before it creates a page in a language the site does not have. It is also the single most expensive thing you can ask for, because it rewrites every text-bearing block on the page — see what things cost. More on how this is wired: multilingual and i18n.

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Pulling from the site

When the editor opens a site, it reads the site’s current content and refreshes any page you have not changed since you last published. A page with unpublished edits keeps your draft. Two commands in the site menu (click the site name in the top bar) go further. Pull from site replaces the draft of every page with what your CMS or content files hold now — including pages you have edited and not published. You want it when someone changed the content somewhere other than Avocado — a developer edited a JSON file, a colleague published from your CMS — and the editor is still showing what it read earlier. It reports what it did (“Pulled 9 pages from site”), and it tells you plainly when there is nothing to read or the site is unreachable. Pages that exist only in your draft are left alone. On a page with undo history, one Undo steps back over the pull.

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Pulling one page

Pull this page does the same for the page you are on, and nothing else. It shows what would change before it does anything:

• Only in your draft — will be removed
• From the site — will be added
• Will change (your draft → the site), field by field

It warns you when this page has edits that were never published, and says so when the draft already matches the site. Press Pull this page to confirm. Undo gives the previous draft back.

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Sessions and site settings

A site in Avocado is a set of pages plus the settings that describe them — name, logo, hosting target, media source, and the editorial brief. Site settings, in the site menu, opens them. View all sites takes you to the Sites page, where each site’s card shows whether it is currently reachable and whether its editing surface is fully working (Editing ready) or degraded (Limited editing). The gear button on a card opens that site’s settings. Limited editing means the site is not describing its blocks to the editor properly. Nothing you do will fix it from this screen; it goes to whoever maintains the integration, with coverage checks.

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