Understand publishing

You can publish all the changes that were made since the last publish operation, or you can pick specific changes to publish.

Keep the following points in mind as you prepare to publish changes:

• Commerce does not use versioning for items (also known as assets) you edit. There is only one version of each item in your system. The most recent updates to an item are the ones that are published. For example, a merchandiser changes the long description and list price of a product and then saves her changes but does not publish them. Later that day, her manager changes the product’s list price again, saves his changes, and publishes the changes. The most recent changes to the product—the merchandiser’s long description and her manager’s list price—are published.
• You can publish all publishable changes that were made since the last publish operation or you can pick the changes you want to publish. For example, two merchandisers are working on different sections of your store. One is working on a promotion campaign due next month and the other has imported and updated new catalog items that need to appear on your store right away. You can publish the catalog changes but not the promotion changes.
• Certain changes you make to the catalog, such as creating a new product type, appear on the Review and Schedule page as a single item called Catalog Configuration. These changes are automatically published during the next publishing operation and cannot be deselected. Click the Catalog Configuration item in the list to see all the changes that are to be published.
• You cannot roll back or undo published changes.
• While changes are being published, you cannot work with your catalog, design items, dashboard, or settings. A Publish in Progress message dialog appears to inform you of this state.

  Although you cannot use the administration interface, programs that implement the Commerce REST APIs might still attempt to update endpoints while changes are being published. During a publish operation, Commerce responds to all PUT or POST calls to endpoints that update publishable resources with HTTP status code 503, Service Unavailable.

• Individual asset changes are listed on the Publishing > Changes page in the administration interface. You can also publish new widget instances or widget descriptors separately from the layout they may be associated with.

Not all changes need to be published. Some changes take effect as soon as you save them. You do not need to publish the following types of changes:

• Shopper settings, such as changes to the password policy.
• Access control settings, such as changes to profiles.
• Inventory updates.
• Account settings, like contacts, if your store supports account-based commerce.
• Search settings, like index fields.
• If direct price editing is enabled for your Commerce store, any price changes you make are available on the storefront without publishing. See Update prices without publishing for more information.