🌐 Qwiki Manual
User Guide / Collaboration & Workflow / Document Lifecycle Statuses

Document Lifecycle Statuses

Every chapter in Standalone Qwiki carries a lifecycle status so teams can draft, review, publish, and retire documentation without exposing unfinished pages to public readers.

The Four Lifecycle States

flowchart LR
    Draft["Draft (Admins Only)"] --> Review["In Review (Admins Only / Review)"]
    Review --> Published["Published (Visible to Readers)"]
    Published --> Archived["Archived (Hidden from Readers)"]
    Archived --> Draft
Status Visible to Public / Viewers? Visible in Search, RSS & LLM API? Purpose
Draft No (returns 404 / omitted from sidebar) No Work-in-progress authoring before review
In Review No (admin preview only) No Editorial check, verification, or peer review
Published Yes (subject to category/page visibility) Yes Live canonical documentation
Archived No (omitted from nav, search, feeds & share links) No Retired documentation kept on disk for reference

Changing a Document's Status

Signed-in administrators can switch a chapter's status directly from the document header's Status dropdown (📝 Set to Draft, 🔍 Set to In Review, 🚀 Set to Published (Release), 📦 Set to Archived) or inside the Document Settings modal.

  • Strict Visibility Gating: Draft, In Review, and Archived documents are filtered out across sidebar navigation, Previous/Next chapter pagers, direct clean URLs, search results, RSS feeds, public share links, and api/llm.php retrieval.
  • Clean Release Sanitization: Moving a document to Published can automatically clean temporary drafting artifacts and synchronize data-qwiki-status attributes on HTML pages.
  • Headless Automation: CI pipelines and qwiki-builder can set default_status or call action=set_status via the Headless Publishing API.