Docs
Review and change requests
A change request bundles drafts — pages, snippets, API references and navigation changes — so they can be reviewed and published together. You can use change requests on any site. When a site requires review, they are the only way anything goes live.
Turn on required review
In the site's Settings, Review:
- Turn on Require review before publishing.
- Pick Approvals needed to merge (1 to 3).
While review is on, nobody publishes directly — Admins and Owners included. Publish, Unpublish, deleting a live page and changing a live page's address are refused; those changes go through a change request. Changes to the navigation (order and sections) also wait for a change request: readers keep seeing the navigation as it was until one is merged.
Turning review off is a site setting, so it needs permission to manage the site. When you turn it off, the navigation goes live as it is arranged in the editor.
Who can review
Authorization comes from organization roles, not from the site:
- Anyone with
docs:page:writecan edit drafts and open change requests. - Anyone with
docs:page:publishcan approve, request changes, merge and undo a merge — whether or not they were asked. - Nobody approves their own change request.
- Reviews, merges and undoing a merge must be done by a person signed in to EvoHub. An API key cannot approve or merge, whatever its scopes.
The Docs reviewer preset gives a role exactly the approve-and-publish side. See Roles and permissions.
Open a change request
Make your edits
Edit pages, snippets or API references and Save draft. Reorder the navigation if you need to.
Start the request
Open Change requests in the site's menu and choose New change request. On a site that requires review, the page editor's Open change request button (in place of Publish) starts one for the page you are on.
On a site with several versions, a change request belongs to one version and publishes to it.
Review a change request
The change request shows each item as a diff of the live text against the draft (the navigation as an outline), plus a Settings block when page settings change. You can comment on the request as a whole or on a single item, and reply in threads.
At the bottom, leave an optional comment and choose Approve or Request changes. Any current request for changes blocks the merge.
Approvals go stale
An approval is tied to exactly what the reviewer saw. If anything in the request changes after that — a draft is edited, an item is added or removed, the request is refreshed — earlier approvals are marked Reset by later edits and stop counting. Ask for another review.
Merge
When the request has enough current approvals and nothing is waiting, it shows Approved and ready to merge and the Merge button. Merging publishes every item at once, in one step: either everything goes live or nothing does. Each published page gets a revision that records the change request.
Outdated requests
Each item remembers the live copy it was drawn against. If someone publishes one of those pages some other way after the request was opened, the request is marked Outdated and cannot be merged. Refresh re-bases it on the current live copies; approvals reset.
Undo a merge
A merged request offers Undo merge, which puts back exactly what was live before it — pages, snippets, API references and navigation. Undo is refused if any of those items was published again since.
Close and reopen
Close sets a request aside without publishing; Reopen brings it back. The author or anyone who can publish can do either.
Preview links
A preview link shows the whole site with the request's drafts in place, for people who do not use the console.
- In the change request, under Preview link, choose Create preview link.
- Copy the link right away; it is shown only once.
Anyone with the link sees the drafts, including pages limited to an audience on a private site, so share it like a password. Preview pages are never indexed or cached, and every link inside stays within the preview. The link stops working when the request is merged or closed, after 30 days, or when you choose Turn off or New link.
Preview links open on the site's own domain, so the site needs an active custom domain. See Connect a custom domain.
Rollbacks under review
On a site that requires review, rolling a page back to an earlier revision puts that revision in the draft and opens a change request for it instead of publishing.
GitHub and imports under review
When a site requires review, a GitHub sync opens (or updates) one change request instead of publishing, and an import into an existing site arrives as one change request. See Docs as code with GitHub and Import and export.
Notifications
Notifications in the Docs menu lists review requests and what happened to your change requests: approvals, requests for changes, comments and merges. Notifications are in the console only; Docs does not email them.
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