A long-requested feature, Design Drafts give you the ability to alter your website’s design without impacting the site's appearance in real time, and without having to go into Maintenance Mode.
To get started on a new draft, head to the SNO Design Options page and select the Design Drafts tab. Click on “Create New Draft” in the middle of the page and you’ll be on your way to a new site design.
It can be helpful to think of working on Design Drafts in a similar way to checking out books at a library. Only one person can “Check Out” and work on a draft at a time, and when they’re finished, that individual needs to return to the Design Draft tab and click “Check In.”
Drafts can also be reset, made private, or viewed by additional staff members while they are checked out by someone else by using the draft-specific buttons within the Design Drafts tab.
The best practice when working on a draft is to make sure that only one person is working on design drafts at a time (even separate drafts), all other tabs of the live site are closed when a draft is checked out, checking in the draft before leaving the site, pushing the draft live, or restoring a design backup, and also to make sure that a login isn't shared by multiple users across multiple computers.
IMPORTANT: Design Draft widgets can get deleted if these best practices are not followed, so we strongly recommend creating Design Backups after making major changes in your drafts in Appearance -> Design Backups. If your widgets get deleted, you can restore a design backup and your drafts will be restored, as well. Please Note: Restoring Design Backups will also move your live site back to the design that was live at the time the backup was created.
Finally, when you’re ready to push out a Design Draft to your website, simply click “Push Live” and watch your site update seconds later, at which point the draft will automatically disappear from the Design Drafts tab to make room for future drafts. *** You MUST Check In your design draft before you push it live. ***
Your site automatically creates a design backup before it pushes a draft live. If something goes wrong when pushing your draft live, you can restore your old design using this design backup. This will also restore your design draft.
There are two other notes to keep in mind when utilizing the Design Drafts tool. First, there is a hard limit of 5 drafts that can exist on your website at any given time. If you have maxed this limit out and you want to create another, you’ll need to delete one. Second, drafts store only design data. Whether you’re viewing your website live or in draft mode, the most recently added content will always appear.
Happy drafting!