Content lifecycle

Content lifecycle governs whether an item is visible in the frontend and whether it is being edited. There are four lifecycle states of an item: Draft, Published, Newer than published, and Unpublished. You can think of lifecycle states as separate versions of an item. An important characteristic of the lifecycle is that an item can be in more than one state at a time – it can have several versions.

Sitefinity NextGen Preview provides a predefined deployment with two environments – Authoring and Production.

The Authoring environment has a backend and a frontend that you can access. You use the Authoring backend for your daily work – creating and changing content such as text, images, or pages. You use the Authoring environment’s frontend to preview your changes as closely as possible to what your site visitors would experience.

The Production environment serves the content to your site visitors. Thus, it has only a frontend, and you cannot access it directly.

IMPORTANT: When you work in the Authoring environment’s backend and perform a Publish operation on a content item, Sitefinity NextGen automatically promotes the changed items to the Production environment.

The following diagram shows the complete view of the full lifecycle for a content in Sitefinity NextGen in response to your action.

IMPORTANT: For the Preview release, some features, such as Recycle Bin and Delete history, are not available or partially implemented.

In short, you create new or update existing content on Authoring environment’s backend in the Draft state. Then you Publish it, and it becomes available in both Authoring environment’s frontend, and in the Production environment.
To delete content, you first Unpublish it, which removes it from both environments’ frontends. Then you can Delete it, which will move it in the Recycle bin.

Additionally, every change you make to the content is tracked in its version history. In a subsequent version of Sitefinity NextGen, you will have access to both the Recycle bin and version history features.

IMPORTANT: For Sitefinity NextGen Preview, only a simplified workflow is exposed in the product’s UX.  The differences are summarized in the following table:

To publish a content item you are currently working on, press the Publish button.
To prevent accidental publishing to Production, you need to confirm this action.

Correspondingly, when you perform the Unpublish operation on a content item, it automatically becomes unpublished in the Production frontend.

If a content type supports reordering, when you reorder its items, they are always immediately Published to the Production.

To quickly get up to speed with the content lifecycle in Sitefinity NextGen, use the interactive demo.

View interactive demo

Lifecycle of page templates

The page templates do not use the complete lifecycle. You cannot unpublish a page template; only the Delete command is available.

To prevent data loss, you can delete only unused page templates.

Lifecycle of pages

You cannot delete the home page. You need to assign another page as the home page first.

You can only delete a page that does not have child pages.

Lifecycle of Content types you create with Content model editor

The content types you create using the Content model editor are immediately published to the Production environment. This happens when you create, edit, and delete them.

On the other hand, when you create or edit items of a custom type, you can save drafts.

NOTE: For the Sitefinity NextGen Preview, a known limitation is that the items you create of a custom content type always have Drafts enabled. This limitation will be lifted in a subsequent release of Sitefinity NextGen, and you will be able to configure items’ lifecycle.