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Publishing means transferring content from a Magnolia author instance to public instances. The technical term for this process is activation.

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Magnolia is distributed as two web applications: an author instance where editors work and a public instance where visitors access the website. Typically you have at least two public instances for load balancing and high availability reasons. Content is published from the author instance to the public instances.

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• Publish: Publishes the selected node to the public instance.
• Publish incl. subnodes: Publishes the selected node and its children to the public instance. This action typically runs asynchronously because it can take a while to activate lots of content.
• Unpublish: Unpublishes (deactivates) the node from the public instance.

Apps typically display the publishing status in the workbench.

Scheduled publishing

With workflow you can schedule publishing (activation) to a future date and include approval steps. Workflow is an Enterprise Edition feature.The editor who launches the publication workflow can add a comment for the reviewer and set a publication date. 

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To publish only modified pages, add a modifiedOnly property in the action definition and set it to true:

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