I second this posting. By making things too simple for users in the long run it can make it much more complex. Any good user interface allows creative activity that isn't destructive of the past. All good ideas are built on the past. Imagine if your teams at Weebly had to work under circumstances which did not allow teams to work on the same code or agile planning.

We the user are no different. I would like the ability to be creative with what I have already built.

I was changing/updating one of the pages on my site yesterday. Changing from gallery format to single picture elements.

I fugured, while I work on the page, if I don't publish it, the live page will look like it was when last published - no changes will appear until I am done.

Little that I knew, the page went live and was showing all my stages of work. Every new picture I added was showing right away on the live site without me publishing it! Anyone could watch my progress if they wanted to.

I duplicated the old page before changing, in case I wanted to go back the the way it was. But why my work was in live mode without publishing?

Hi @JustImagine.

That is very strange. You would indeed have to click the publish button for the changes to go live. Please let me know if this happens to you again. If it does, please note the actions you were taking around the time you noticed things went live without you clicking publish.

Thanks,

Erin

@Erin

Hi Erin, Yes I'll be watchig. It doesn't happen all the time. But that time I know I didn't publish. 

This happened to me too. I was creating my site in the background without publishing anything (didn't click the Publish button at all), and to my surprise all changes were appearing on the live site before I was ready. I panicked and deleted a bunch of stuff because I couldn't figure out how to stage an offline copy of the site that I could publish later. Now I need to re-create a bunch of stuff due to either my lack of knowledge of how Weebly works, or a bug in Weebly (or both).

Hello @no_treble and @JustImagine

After you publish your site, always click the link to your site to view it. If you publish one thing then keep working it can sometimes load the content live. I have heard of people experiencing this but I will need more proof to get it escalated. I have not yet been able to recreate this issue myself, but I have also not had anyone else say anything after I told them to always click the link and view the site after publishing. It would be great if everyone that experienced this can find this thread I might be able to create a new thread with this and move your posts over into this specific thread but I will need your blessing to do this. Can I move both of your posts over to a new thread? This will help us a great deal to help everyone.

Yes, that's fine with me. Thanks for the help!

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@Erin wrote:

Hi @JustImagine.

That is very strange. You would indeed have to click the publish button for the changes to go live. Please let me know if this happens to you again. If it does, please note the actions you were taking around the time you noticed things went live without you clicking publish.

Thanks,

Erin

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@Erin

@This happened to me this morning also!  I was adding text to the main shop page and before I published it, it was LIVE!  I'm glad @JustImagine brought it up, because I thought I was losing it.  

I marked this as solved a long time ago in an attempt to give Weebly the benefit of the doubt when reassured that staff were looking into it.

Months later, nothing has changed. If anything, the situation is worse. I was under a false impression that things had improved because I went through a period without any days of long hours working on a site.

Today, my previous belief is confirmed. On virtually 100% of days when I spend multiple hours working on a Weebly website, Weebly reaches a point where it either overwrites supposedly saved changes with previous versions of a page's content. Or, as was the case today, it reaches a point in the day when it simply refuses to save 100% of changes made, so that whenever I switch from a page with changes made, the changes are gone when I return to it. Having reached this point, now 100% of my efforts to publish changes fail to publish, no matter how many times I republish, and changes are lost whenever I leave a page.

Similar things happen to overseas contractors working on my sites.

For how long will Weebly refuse to fix this problem and continue destroying its customers' work?

Sorry to hear that you're still having trouble, @jamesbrecknell. Do you know what browser and operating system your contributors are using? Do you have an example page of your site where this happened?

45 of my shop categories disappeared and then returned about 15 minutes later, in the wrong order. After I fixed the order, the category list as it appears in product items and in spreadsheet exports is different. I'm well invested in Weebly and have stayed invested because months go by without my work being undone, creating the illusion that things have improved - and then, bam! Hours of work wasted. Weebly has an excellent overall set of features and ease of use, but if issues like these remain unaddressed for long periods of time, obviously it will continue to frustrate people.

Ahh, ok; thanks for taking the time to explain what happened. I can totally understand how that would be frustrating to recreate.

The same thing is happening to me and my website is for NHD and we are supposed to turn in our projects by tomorrow morning and I will not be able to complete this in all in one night. I was almost done with my site and earlier today I was on it and I published my site and then later when I went back on to do some final touches, almost everything was gone. I need this fixed ASAP. Thank you.

Hey there! Can you let us know what is missing from the site? We'll take a look here and see what can be done.

Most of my 2nd-page that I have is missing.

Chiming in here as well. I was editing my site and accidentally deleted all the content of a page along with the background image (which was all I actually wanted to delete). I figured it was fine, since I did NOT hit the Publish button. Instead I closed the window.

BUT, lo and behold, despite not being told to publish, the actual page was nuked of all content. I searched high and low for a "revert to older version" or "undo" but it appears this is not an option.

That's just bad user experience and I strongly recommend Weebly adds a function like this (unless it already exists and I just missed it).