Publishing content when site if private

Using Ghost
1

I have a site that it’s set as private while I’m building it out. I have some questions about how the publish function works when the site isn’t live yet, to try and work out how to best roll out content on day one when it’s all ready:

  1. I assume the only way to see content on the home page and in tags (essentially so I can see how the site looks from a design perspective with some content available) is to use the publish feature?
  2. I assume all the sites are fully private and not listed on search etc until the overall site is live?
  3. When pages are published on a private site, what happens when the site is fully live? Does it feature the timestamp of when it was published privately, or does everything have a new timestamp on the overall live publish date / time?
  4. If it’s the former, can you unpublish all the work at once, and republish when the site is live? It’ll be a bit jarring to have content dated for months prior, for example, and not sure of the SEO impact there.

If there’s any functionality I’m missing along these lines, would appreciate knowing. Thank you!

2

1 - Yes. Before you start publishing, make sure the network toggle is OFF, so that your site doesn’t leak content out to the Fediverse. (I have not checked this week, but it was true a couple weeks ago.)

2 - See note about about ActivityPub/Network tab/Fediverse. I also just saw a site that is currently set to private appear in Explore, but its for a site that has been public and private over the last couple weeks, so it might have gotten indexed while set to public. For safety, I would also turn off the Explore tab.

3 - Published is published. No dates will change.

4 - Yes, you could unpublish and republish, or just edit the published post to use the new dates. (If you unpublish and republish, any webhooks, including those that trigger the post going out to the Fediverse/ActivityPub/Social Web will fire. So if you want to share your content to the world, unpublish and republish (after turning the network toggle on) would be the way to go.

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3

You don’t need to turn off the Explore setting. Explore is like any other visitor - it’s not able to access private sites. If you set a site to public, then yes - it can be accessed.

4

I think Explore vs ActivityPub Explore tabs are mixing up. I can confirm that, if Social Web is enabled, Ghost publishes posts automatically to ActviityPub when even site set as private. There is a GitHub issue for this.

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5

Confirm - that’s a bug - will be resolved shortly

2 Likes
6

Cheers for the replies - I’ll likely go for the unpublish and republish option when it’s ready to roll so I have a bit more control. Thank you all!

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7

Hi,

sorry I’m new to Ghost(Pro). We are also building a new site and would like to see how it looks like before publishing it. If set to private you need a password, but what does it mean “network toggle is OFF”?

Is there an option in the setting panel?

Edit: ah is the Network panel under the “Growth” options right?

Thanks!

8

Right, sorry! :slight_smile:

(And now I need to write some extra words.)

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