Scope of edits

When you edit pages in a project, you use workflow for approving changes before you publish them until they are approved. If you edit pages without selecting a project, your changes are published immediately.

When you edit pages, it is good practice to work within a project. When you are working in a project, any changes that you make to a page affect only the view within the project. After the project is approved and published, the changes are then available to all users.
Note: Changes to private pages and community pages are not part of a project. When you are working in a project, actions that personalize or create a private page are not visible.

When no project is selected, you are modifying the published site. Changes to public pages affect all users and are available immediately. While you work on the published site, changes that other users are making within active projects are not visible.

Default workflow for pages in projects

To make the page changes available on the published site, you must submit the page for review and approval. The steps for the workflow depend on what is defined for the page. By default, a simple workflow is assigned to page or URL mapping drafts. The default workflow (Express Workflow) has only two states: draft and published. For pages that use this workflow, submitting the draft moves the page to the publish pending state. When all other changes in the project are published, the pending draft page is also published. After all items in the project reach the pending state before publishing, you can publish the project by clicking Publish in the project menu.
Note: If you use the authoring portlet to edit the access settings for a page that is part of a workflow, you cannot modify the approvers. To change the approvers for the page, you must set the approvers on the workflow stage that currently contains the page.
However, you can change the assigned workflow in the user interface to include more review and approval stages on the project level in Web Content Manager. After the draft changes in the project are approved and published, the updated pages are visible to all users. For details on using a custom workflow, see Adding workflow to managed pages.