Edits land on a draft, not the live feed#
Whenever you change a channel's settings, fields, or automations — by hand, or by asking Aimée to make the change in chat — that change is saved to a draft copy of the channel. It does not touch the channel that's currently deployed to your feed URL.
This means you can experiment freely: add fields, rework automations, let Aimée restructure a field, all without any risk of an ad network picking up a half-finished change.
The same draft-then-publish shape shows up elsewhere in Renable — a template's edits stay on a draft until you publish it in Studio, and a project's product sets have their own Publish selection step; see Selecting and publishing products. Each surface has its own draft and its own Publish button — publishing one doesn't publish the others.
Unpublished changes#
The channel page's header always shows Discard draft and Publish buttons, plus an "Unpublished changes" label when the draft differs from what's currently published:
- Discard draft — resets the draft back to match the published version. Your unpublished work isn't lost: it's saved to version history first, so you can restore it from the Aimée drawer's timeline (see Where version history lives).
- Publish — commits the draft as a new version and deploys it to the live feed URL.
Discarding a draft changes nothing on your live feed, so it doesn't appear in your dashboard's Changes to know about — only real publishes do.
If the draft matches the published version (nothing to publish), both buttons are disabled and the "Unpublished changes" label disappears — they don't vanish from the page, they just can't be clicked.
What Publish actually does#
Clicking Publish:
- Saves a new version of the channel (only if the draft is actually different from the last published version).
- Deploys that version to the live feed — the same URL ad networks already have, refreshed with your changes. This uses the fast deploy path, so the redeploy starts within about 15 seconds — full completion can take longer for large catalogs or while images/videos are still rendering.
Publishing starts the rendering immediately, but the live feed only changes once it's done. If your change means new images or videos have to be produced, the feed at your URL keeps its previous contents until those renders land, rather than briefly serving products whose media isn't ready. That is usually a few minutes. Renable waits up to an hour, then publishes what it has: any product whose images or videos still aren't finished goes out archived (or out of stock, depending on the channel's rules) for that one update and comes back on the next one, and a warning appears on the channel saying it happened. If you'd rather have the rest of a change out at once and let the media catch up, use Regenerate, which publishes immediately without waiting — see Working with channels.
Background regeneration only affects the published channel#
Renable also regenerates channels automatically in the background — for example, when your catalog's product feed refreshes hourly, or when a price or stock level changes. This automatic regeneration always applies to the currently published channel, not your draft.
In practice this means:
- If you have unpublished changes sitting in a draft, background price/stock updates keep the published version's feed current — your draft edits don't ride along until you publish.
- Publishing is the only way to move your draft changes into the feed ad networks actually read.
Where version history lives#
Every publish is saved as a version, but there's no separate "Versions" tab on the channel page itself. Version history and restore live in the global Aimée chat drawer's timeline — the same place template version history lives. Open the drawer while viewing the channel to see past versions and restore one if needed.
Where to go next#
- Working with channels
- Channel fields and placeholders
- Channel automations
- Working with Aimée
- Questions about channels — including "why isn't my change showing up in the ad network yet?"