Manually controlling when your content is published is sometimes critical in ensuring the consistency and integrity of your website.
Normally, Super works automatically to sync your content from Notion to your website. But in some cases you might need more control over when content is synced to your live site.
Super’s Manual Publishing feature allows you to control when your content is published to your server, but still allows you to preview the current Notion content in the Dashboard preview. This allows you to write, produce, organize and style the content and pages in the Dashboard, and then Publish when you are ready.
Overview of the Manual Publishing process
The site preview in the Super app will always show the latest updates even with manual publishing turned on so you know how your site should look and check everything before you publish to the live site.
When you are ready to publish your content, press the Publish updates button. This will publish your content and code updates to the live site on your custom domain.
What is different when Manual Publishing is turned on?
When Manual Publishing is turned on, your Super Dashboard will continue to work as it always has and will preview the current Notion content and customizations. Any changes to the content in Notion and customizations (like code and SEO settings) will not be published to the live site on the connected domain until you publish them.
What happens when Manual Publishing is turned back off?
If you turn Manual Publishing off after it has been on, then the live site on the connected domain will start requesting updates from Notion and Super and your live site will start updating again automatically.
How to enable Manual Publishing
1. Ensure you have a Pro tier site
In order to activate manual publishing you will first need to upgrade your site on to a Pro tier plan. In order to do this you can click the ‘Upgrade now’ button on your site dashboard.
2. Connect a custom domain
Next, in order for manual publishing to work you must connect a domain. To add a domain to your site, head into your site dashboard and click into the Domains page, then click the Add a custom domain button.
3. Enable Manual Publishing
Once you have upgraded to the Pro Tier and connected your custom domain, you can enable Manual Publishing by turning on the Manual Publishing toggle. When enabled the live site is only updated when you press the Publish updates button.
4. Work in the Dashboard as normal
Notion content changes will flow through to the Super dashboard automatically as you view different pages in the dashboard. Changes to custom code will apply in real time to the dashboard preview.
When Manual publishing is enabled, none of the updates from Notion or the changes that you make in the Super Dashboard will be published to the site on the connected domain.
You can also manually refresh a page by pressing the Dashboard refresh button. This will send a request to see if there is new content in Notion and rebuild the page if required.
If you would like to see a non-dashboard preview of the site, use the default super.site domain for your site. Only the custom domain will not receive the updates.
5. Publish content to the live site
Publishing process is controlled by you. When you are ready to publish your updates to the live site on the custom domain, simply press the Publish now button.
When you push the Publish button, Super will begin queuing the request to the Server. This involves clearing the CDN cache so that the updates are available to site visitors.
After the changes are in the queue, the publishing status will change to Publish pending. When the site has been rebuilt the Last published time will be updated. If no changes needed to be published then the time will remain at the last time changes were actually published to the site.