The publishing flow

A post is always in one of five states:

• Draft — you are writing. Only you and editors see it.
• Submitted— you’ve sent it to editors for review.
• Changes requested — an editor has read it and left feedback.
• Approved— an editor has approved it and it’s ready to publish.
• Published— it’s live on valeon.blog.

While you’re writing, the post is a draft. When you’re ready for an editor to look at it, click Submit for review in the editor toolbar.

You can change your mind and pull the draft back at any time before it’s reviewed by clicking Withdraw. The post returns to a draft and you can keep editing.

An editor will read your submission. If they want changes, they’ll leave a note explaining what to revise and the post moves to Changes requested. The feedback thread sits inline with the post so you can refer back to it as you edit.

When you’ve made the changes, click Resubmit. The post goes back to submitted for another round of review.

See Reviews & approvals for the editor’s side of this flow.

Once an editor approves the post, it’s queued for publishing. Editors (and authors with direct-publish permission) can publish it from the editor toolbar.

Publishing makes the post visible on the public blog. It also triggers the markdown render pipeline and, if audio is enabled, the text-to-speech job. The post becomes readable right away; the audio version arrives a little later. See Audio synthesis.

The moment you click Publish, the post is live on the blog. You can share the URL straight away — there’s no waiting around for the background jobs to finish.

What the page looks like depends on what’s ready:

• Before the render job finishes — the page shows your post as a raw markdown code block. It’s readable, just unstyled. The render usually takes a few seconds.
• Once the render job finishes — the page automatically swaps to the styled HTML. Anyone with the page open sees the update without refreshing.
• Once the audio job finishes (if you enabled audio) — the audio player appears at the top of the page, again without a refresh.

So the sequence is: publish, share the link immediately, let the page upgrade itself as the pipeline catches up. See The pipeline page to monitor what’s still running.

When you click publish, the dashboard runs a few checks. Some are hard blocks — you can’t publish without them. Others are just warnings.

Hard blocks

• The post has a title.
• The slug is set (derived from the title by default).
• A cover image is set.

Warnings

• An excerpt has been written (recommended for previews).
• At least one category is assigned.
• If the post is in a series, that the series order is set.

You can choose to publish through warnings. Hard blocks have to be resolved first.