Tabern

Publishing model

How drafts, publish, and snapshots work — the mental model behind every Tabern site.

Tabern sites don't work like a live editor where every keystroke goes public. Changes save as drafts; publishing takes a complete snapshot and puts it live. This page explains the model precisely.

Two states: draft and published

Every piece of venue content — pages, menus, deals, hours, integrations — exists in two states:

  • Draft — your working copy in the dashboard. Edit freely; guests never see it.
  • Published snapshot — the version guests see on your subdomain. Complete and self-contained.

Editing a draft never touches the live site. Unpublishing removes the snapshot but keeps every draft. This is why a half-finished edit can never break your public site.

What a snapshot contains

When you publish, Tabern captures your current venue content into an immutable snapshot:

  • Venue branding, pages, and section content
  • Active menus, items, and their photos and prices
  • Active deals
  • Locations, hours, and contact details
  • Booking and other integrations
  • Your active rewards program, if any
  • Image references for everything above

Inactive menus, draft items, and draft deals are skipped — a snapshot contains what's active at publish time.

Each page publishes its own content

The Website, Menu, Deals, and Settings pages each have their own Publish control. Publishing the Menu puts your current active menus live without republishing your About story. There's no site-wide "publish all" and none is needed.

The Google reviews exception

Google reviews are the one piece of public content that isn't frozen at publish time. Reviews you've pulled in by connecting your Google Business Profile live in Tabern's database and display per your Show reviews toggle — they can change when you sync, without republishing. Everything else follows the snapshot model.

Subscription and snapshots

  • Publishing requires an active (or trialing) subscription. Payment-grace states keep publishing enabled.
  • Canceling at period end keeps the snapshot live until the period ends, then the site goes offline.
  • A disabled or deleted subscription takes the published snapshot offline. Drafts survive — resubscribe and publish to return.
  • Creating a new venue requires a subscription in good standing; an existing venue's publishing is more lenient.

See Billing & subscription.

Fixing published mistakes

There is no rollback UI in the dashboard. To undo a published change, edit the draft back to what you want and publish again. Because each publish creates a fresh complete snapshot, the previous version is simply replaced — no history to manage.