We are currently working on migrating our website from Framer to DivHunt. The goal is to move the project into Production using DivHunt’s CMS, file system, and styling capabilities.
However, we’ve encountered an issue where any changes made in the editor, such as updates to CMS collections, file contents, or styles are immediately reflected on the live site, even without republishing.
Our expectation is that the published site should remain static and act as a snapshot of the CMS and file system at the moment of publishing. Changes made during development should not affect the production version until a manual publish is triggered.
This behavior is currently blocking our migration, as it introduces the risk of unintentional updates reaching the live environment while working on a next version.
Is there a way to ensure that changes remain isolated until explicitly published?
Any advice or clarification would be greatly appreciated.
While you are logged in as Admin, you can see live changes instantly without publishing. This is to improve speed of developement, especially when working with custom code - for example in Webflow you need to publish each time to see if your JS works for example.
In Divhunt, as an admin, you always see the live dev version when you visit a website, and when you publish everyone can see it.
You can check this from incognito mode just to make sure.
Heres the video explaning live preview (publish system):
@Pakic thanks for the explanation and video! I totally understand and appreciate the ability to see draft changes in development as an admin, it’s a great feature and definitely speeds up the workflow.
However, the issue I’m describing is a bit different, and it affects the actual live site behavior for anonymous users, not just logged-in admins.
Here’s a quick summary of what’s happening (as shown in the attached video):
I have a version of the site published and publicly accessible
I go into the CMS and modify a record (e.g., update text or content)
I do not publish any new site version
I then open the site in incognito mode (no admin login or cookies)
The CMS change is immediately visible on the live site
This means the live version is not isolated from CMS updates, and changes are going public instantly, even though no new publish was triggered. That’s the core issue, it breaks the assumption of a stable, versioned production environment.
P.S.
@Marc I may have misunderstood your suggestion about leaving the item unpublished. Just to clarify, my goal is for any CMS changes (edits to existing entries or new ones) to stay hidden from the live site until I explicitly publish a new version.
Oh, my suggestion would only work for new items, not edits to existing ones if I’m understanding you correctly.
Personally, I find DivHunt’s process of managing the CMS useful as it allows clients to access and manage their CMS on their own without having to worry about publishing, however, I can see your argument too.
Unfortunately we dont have this functionality, it will be in future.
Now once you click that “Published” toggle, its live for everyone. And any edits are going live without additional publishing.
It’s not a simple thing to be improved from developers perspective, we would need to create doubled data for all of the CMS items, and each CMS item would have two versions then (production/published , and dev), which we plan for future, but now its not possible
