Publishing People and Public Family Branches
See exactly what is private, what is only a preview, and what becomes public when you publish family pages.
Publishing People and Public Family Branches
Rooted uses one short publication flow:
- Choose one or more people and create a publication request.
- Rooted prepares private person and family-branch previews.
- Open the previews and choose the family branches you intend to publish.
- Select Publish once and confirm.
- Rooted checks and publishes that exact selection in the background.
There are no separate Verify, Approve, Preflight, or Execute buttons. Those are machine stages, not decisions an owner should have to understand.
Where to click
Open a tree, select Research, then select Public pages. You can create a request there or continue a request created from a person's sharing control.
The request first appears under Open requests while Rooted prepares its preview. When it is ready, open the request, inspect its links, leave selected only the family branches you want, and select Publish. A completed or discarded request moves to History, so the active list stays useful.
What each state means
| State | Meaning | Public on the internet? |
|---|---|---|
| Preparing preview | Rooted is building owner-only pages for inspection. | No |
| Ready to review | The private previews are ready and waiting for your decision. | No |
| Publishing | Your exact selection is being checked and published. | Pages are made public in bounded steps; the request lists any URL that has already changed |
| Published | Rooted opened the resulting URLs anonymously and confirmed the public result. | Yes |
| Needs attention | A named check or background stage could not finish. | The request page says what succeeded and what did not |
| Discarded | The unpublished request was closed without publishing it. | No |
Private preview versus public page
A private preview has a real URL so that you can open it. That does not make it public. The preview requires the tree owner's session, sends private/no-store and noindex headers, and is absent from sitemaps and public artifact lists.
A published page is different: an anonymous visitor can open its canonical
/public/... URL. Rooted declares a request Published only after checking that
anonymous result, its metadata, snapshot, links, and Open Graph image.
People, branches, and already-public relatives
The people you choose are publication targets. Rooted groups their future public relationships into connected family branches so that an unrelated family group cannot be published by accident.
An already-public relative may appear in a preview to show the real family context. That relative is a dependency, not a newly selected target. Selecting or clearing a branch controls the complete new branch represented by that preview; it does not silently broaden the selection to another disconnected branch.
If the source data changes after the preview was made, Rooted refuses to publish the stale selection. Use Refresh preview, inspect the new immutable preview, and select Publish again.
What the automatic checks do
After your single Publish confirmation, Rooted automatically checks:
- publication eligibility and privacy-safe fields;
- every expected person, relationship, family card, and internal link;
- HTML metadata and Open Graph image dimensions;
- source, membership, topology, language, and renderer fingerprints;
- the final public URLs as an anonymous visitor.
The Publish confirmation is the owner's authorization. Machine verification is evidence that Rooted can safely carry out that authorization; it is not a second owner decision.
If a request needs attention
The request shows a stable issue code, a plain-language explanation, the failed stage, and whether it is safe to retry.
- Select Retry for a temporary failure. Retry resumes the stored operation and cannot add people or branches.
- Select Refresh preview when the source data or topology changed. A refreshed preview always requires a new Publish confirmation.
- Select Discard to close an unpublished request.
Discarding a request is not the same as unpublishing completed pages. Published pages remain public until you explicitly change their current publication policy.
Using the API
The API exposes the same request workflow, including one interactive-owner Publish command. See Publication Requests API for request bodies, status responses, idempotency, and authentication rules.