Publish and lock a catalog year

Publish and lock a catalog year

Move a draft catalog year live, and understand the read-only lock that protects it
once it’s published. A catalog year is always in one of four states: Draft,
Active, Published, or Offline. Only the active year and drafts are open
for routine editing. See
about the catalog year lifecycle for
what each state means.

Publish a draft, or make it the active year

A new catalog year starts as a Draft, hidden from the public catalog, so a year
is never live while it’s still being built. When it’s ready, you have two ways to
bring it out of draft depending on whether it should replace the current year:

Publish makes the year public without changing which year is the default. It
appears in the public year switcher alongside the active year, so students can browse
it, but the active year stays the default. Use this for an upcoming year you want
visible early, or an archived year you’re keeping available. Open the draft’s row
actions on Catalog Years and select Publish; to pull it back out of view,
use Return to Draft.

Set as Active makes the year the default students see first, and moves whatever
was active before into the Published state automatically.

1. Go to Catalog Years in the sidebar.
2. Find the year you want to make the default, open its row actions, and select
   Set as Active.
3. Read the confirmation, which tells you the current active year is about to move
   to Published, and, if your public year window would be exceeded, which older
   year(s) will be taken offline as a result.
4. Click Set Active.

The new year is now active and public. The year it replaced is now published: still
visible to the public, but closed to routine edits.

Unlock a published year to make a correction

Published years are read-only by default so an edition can’t be silently rewritten
after the fact. If you find a genuine error (a typo, an outdated phone number) in a
published year, unlock it, fix it, and lock it again rather than leaving it open.

1. On the Catalog Years list, open the published year’s row actions.
2. Select Unlock for editing.
3. Confirm. The year now shows an Unlocked badge, and its programs,
   credentials, courses, and policies accept edits again.
4. Make your correction.
5. Return to the same row actions menu and select Lock editing when you’re
   done.

If you leave a year unlocked, anyone with catalog access can continue editing it
until someone locks it again; there’s no automatic re-lock.

Take a year offline or bring it back

Offline is different from locked: it controls whether a year’s records are visible
to the public at all, not whether they’re editable. Use the same row actions menu
and select Take Offline or Bring Online. The active year can’t be taken
offline; set a different year active first.

For the reasoning behind the lock, see
why published years are read-only.