Autosave, Collaboration and Locking

There is no Save button in the Leed editor. There is no dirty indicator, no asterisk beside the title, and no “you have unsaved changes” warning when you close the tab — because there is nothing waiting to be saved. Every keystroke is already stored by the time you make the next one.

Collaborative editing is free on every plan. Nothing on this page depends on your tier.

What autosave actually saves

The document you are typing into is not a file on your machine that gets uploaded periodically. It is a shared document held on the server, and your edits are applied to it as increments as you make them — a character, a formatting change, a moved block. Someone else opening the same page a second later gets the same document, already including your last keystroke.

Markdown — the format your page is eventually stored and published as — is produced only when the page publishes (and on demand when an AI client asks to read the page). That is why there is nothing to save: there is no separate file lagging behind the editor that you might forget to write out. Overview and Cheat Sheet is right to call Leed Markdown a storage format rather than an editing one.

The practical consequences are worth stating flatly: closing the tab mid-sentence loses nothing, a browser crash loses nothing, and there is no recovery flow to learn because there is nothing to recover.

Autosave is not publishing

This is the same staged-changes model the whole CMS runs on — pages, menus, page types, layouts and settings all sit in a pending state until a deployment carries them out. Must Publish is the mental model; How Publishing Works is the machinery.

Working with other people

Several people can edit the same page at the same time, with no locking, no checkout and no merge step.

• Presence avatars sit in the top row of the document header, one per person currently in the page, with their name on hover. Click an avatar and the canvas scrolls to where that person’s cursor is.
• Colored cursors and selections appear in the canvas, one color per collaborator, with a name label on the caret.
• Edits merge as they happen. Two people typing in the same paragraph both keep their text; there is no conflict dialog because there is no conflict to resolve.

An edit made by an AI client over MCP lands in the same shared document, with its own presence cursor labeled as the operator, so you see it arrive live in an editor you already have open — you do not need to reload. What that edit looks like depends on which tool made it: a whole-body fill applies directly, while an anchored block edit lands as tracked suggestions for you to accept or reject. Authoring Pages Over MCP covers both.

The two connection states you will see

The editor does not render until the document has arrived. That is deliberate — an editable canvas showing an empty or partial document would invite you to type into something that is about to be replaced.

Transient trouble does not produce the second message. A dropped connection, a network blip or a server hiccup is retried in the background with the header and canvas intact; the fatal message is shown only when the answer is a definite refusal.

When editing is refused

“I can’t type” has three different causes, and readers routinely conflate them. They look different, they mean different things, and only one of them is worth worrying about.

The page is published

A published revision is a permanent record of exactly what went live, so it is frozen. The version chip gains a lock glyph with the tooltip Page is locked (read-only), the entire formatting toolbar disappears rather than graying out, and the mode selector shows Locked: Readonly.

Revise creates the next revision and unlocks it. Your published page keeps serving the whole time. Revisions and Versions covers the cycle and how to undo a revision you have started.

You do not have edit rights

If you can open the page but not change it, the mode selector is pinned to Viewing and explains itself: View Only: No edit permissions. The check runs against your role plus any override that applies to this page, its page type or its labels — so it is possible to be able to edit most pages and not this one. Roles and Permissions sets out who gets what.

The page is publishing right now

Two things stop that message being noise. It is only shown to someone who was actually editing — if you opened a page that was already locked, or you only ever had read access, you cannot have lost an edit and you are not told about one. And the editor flips to read-only live as the lock lands, so you are not left typing into a document that is refusing you.

The message itself is an amber strip pinned to the bottom center of the editor, over an otherwise normal canvas — the editor does not go read-only or lose your cursor:

Your last edit wasn’t saved — the page is locked for publishing.

It clears on its own once the publish finishes and the lock lifts.

The states a page moves through

The same five words are used as revision statuses, as filter facets on the page tree, and as the transitions between them. Which ones you can reach from where is easier to see than to read:

stateDiagram-v2
  direction LR
  InRevision: In Revision
  [*] --> Draft: create a page
  Draft --> Scheduled: publish or schedule
  Scheduled --> Draft: unschedule (never published)
  Scheduled --> Published: the build runs
  Published --> InRevision: Revise
  InRevision --> Scheduled: publish or schedule
  Scheduled --> InRevision: unschedule (published before)
  InRevision --> Published: Revert
  Published --> Replaced: superseded by a newer revision

  note left of Draft
    Editable. You can type,
    the toolbar is shown.
  end note
  note right of Scheduled
    Locked. Frozen so the
    publish is reproducible.
  end note
  note right of Replaced
    An immutable record of
    what used to be live.
  end note

Draft and In Revision are the two editable states — a Draft has never been published, a revision has. Scheduled and Published are locked. Replaced is the previous published revision after you revise: kept, immutable, and what Revert restores if you abandon a revision in progress.

There is a sixth status, Approved, in the underlying model and in the page tree’s filter list. Nothing in the CMS sets it, so no page ever reaches it. Treat it as reserved; see Publishing and Scheduling a Page.

Two people revising at once

If two people click Revise on the same published page at nearly the same moment, only one new revision is created. The second attempt is detected, that person is told Another user already revised this page. Reloading., and their editor reloads onto the first person’s revision. You never end up with two competing revisions of one page and no way to reconcile them.

What collaboration does not carry

Some of what you see in a shared editor belongs to the working document and never leaves it:

The three messages quoted on this page are also indexed, with everything else the CMS can say to you, on Common Error Messages.