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Publish a web site

Publishing converts a map into a live documentation site with search, navigation, and a table of contents.

Before you begin

  • You need a map with at least one topic. The map structure becomes the site's navigation hierarchy.

  • Optionally, create condition profiles and variable sets if your content uses conditional blocks or variables.

Create a publication target

  1. Open a map and scroll to Publication Targets.

  2. Click New Target.

  3. Enter a name (for example, "Public Docs").

  4. Select Web as the output format.

  5. Select a condition profile: choose which dimension values to include. Leave blank to include all content.

  6. Select a variable set: choose which variable values to substitute.

  7. Optionally add variable overrides for target-specific values.

Use condition profiles to publish different variants of the same content from a single map. For example, publish one target for end users (filtering out admin-only content) and another for administrators (including everything).

Publish

  1. Click Publish on the target.

  2. The target is validated first. If any topic has a blocking validation error, publishing is refused and you are directed to the Validation panel to fix it.

  3. Publishing then runs as a background job that reports progress. It processes your content through 4 stages:

    • Resolve: replaces component references with component content

    • Filter: removes conditional blocks that do not match the condition profile

    • Replace: substitutes variable tokens with values from the variable set

    • Render: converts the resolved content to HTML

    The job also generates social preview images, embeddings, AI-readiness scores, and the search index.

  4. When the job completes, the target shows a URL.

View the published site

Click the URL to open your site. It includes:

  • Homepage with site name, logo, search bar, and page cards

  • Sidebar navigation matching the map hierarchy

  • Per-page table of contents generated from headings, with scroll tracking

  • Previous/next links between pages

  • Full-text search (Cmd+K)

  • Dark mode toggle

  • "Was this helpful?" feedback widget on each page

Update after changes

After editing topics, components, or the map structure, click Update on the target (the button reads Publish before the first publish, then Update once the site is live). The site regenerates with the updated content.

A published site is served from a cache, so edits to topics, components, variables, or the map structure are not reflected instantly. Cached pages refresh within 24 hours, or you can click Update on the target to publish the latest content immediately.

Unpublish

Toggle the target's published state to take the site offline. The URL stops serving content.

See also

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