Publish standard content types
You need ‘editor’ permissions on Whitehall Publisher to publish content.
If you need these permissions, ask an organisation admin on your team.
Publish someone else’s draft
If you’re happy for a draft to go live, select either:
- ‘Publish’, to publish it now
- ‘Schedule’, if the person who created the draft added a scheduled publication date – you can unschedule it later if you want to change the draft or the scheduled date
The person who created the draft will get an email either way.
Publish your own draft urgently without a review
In rare circumstances you may need to ‘force publish’ a document. For example, if a document needs to be published urgently and there is no editor available to review it.
Select ‘Force publish’ or ‘Force schedule’. You’ll need to give a reason why you needed to force publish without a review.
Review the content after force publishing
Your content will be flagged in Whitehall Publisher as ‘not reviewed’.
An editor should review the content as soon as possible after publication. When they’re happy with it, they should select ‘Approve’ on the edition summary page. This will remove the ‘not reviewed’ flag.
How long content takes to go live
If you’re publishing something without scheduling:
- new content will go live straight away
- updates to existing content will go live in up to 5 minutes
If you’re scheduling, it will go live at the requested time. However, it must be scheduled at least 30 minutes beforehand.
If a page does not seem to have been updated, it may be because you’re looking at a cached version. The time this takes to update is controlled by your IT team.
You can check if a page has updated by:
- using a smartphone or non-work computer to access the page, instead of your work computer
- doing a ‘cache-bust’ by putting a question mark and some random text after the page URL you’re looking at – for example www.gov.uk/government/organisations?RANDOMTEXT
Do not share or publicise URLs that:
- are cache-busted
- have not been gone live yet – users will see a ‘Page not found (404)’ message instead of the content
Email notifications
Once the draft has been published, users might get an email notification about it unless you’re publishing a ‘minor’ update without change notes.
To get an email notification, users would need to be subscribed to updates from one of the tagged:
- organisations
- ministers
- topical events
- worldwide locations
- topic pages
They may also be subscribed to all government content published in a certain format, like ‘Guidance and regulations’.
If you’re publishing a major update, they could also be subscribed to the content itself if it’s a:
- consultation
- detailed guide
- document collection
- publication
Users can choose how often they want to receive email alerts – ‘immediately’, ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’. That means users can be notified at different times.