Draft and published
Every passage, writing prompt, lesson and guide is either draft or published.
Candidates only ever see published content.
That is the whole rule, and it is worth being certain of before you write anything: nothing you create is visible to anyone until you publish it.
New content starts as a draft
Anything created through the CMS — by the form or by import — is a draft. You publish it deliberately, when it is ready.
Publishing checks completeness first
Publishing runs a check and refuses if the item is incomplete, listing exactly what is wrong. The checks include:
- A question with no answer key.
- A matching-headings question on a passage with no headings list.
- A lesson where every stage is empty.
The error names the specific problem rather than saying something went wrong, because the specific problem is the only useful part.
Editing something already published
Editing a published item saves in place and stays published. There is no draft copy of a live row, no review step and no version history.
An edit to a published passage is live immediately
There is nothing to undo it with. If you are making a substantial change to something candidates are actively practising on, unpublish it first, edit, then publish again.
Deleting is blocked once it has been used
If a passage has attempts against it — or a lesson has been marked read by anyone — deleting it is refused, and the error says so.
Unpublish it instead. That takes it out of circulation for every candidate while leaving their history intact and readable. A candidate who sat a passage in March should still be able to open their review of it in June.
This is a real check, not a database setting. It runs before anything is deleted, and it is what stands between a tidy-up and a hole in somebody's records.