Locking and Revising Internal Pages

A published page’s revision history is what makes its version number trustworthy: each published version is frozen, and changing it means starting a new one. Internal pages keep that discipline without ever going live. In place of Publish, an internal page has Lock revision, and a locked revision is frozen exactly as a published one is until somebody presses Revise.

stateDiagram-v2
    direction LR
    state "Draft — v1" as Draft
    state "In Revision — v2 and up" as InRevision
    state "Locked" as Locked
    [*] --> Draft: create a page
    Draft --> Locked: Lock revision
    Locked --> InRevision: Revise, version + 1
    InRevision --> Locked: Lock revision
    InRevision --> Locked: Revert Changes, version - 1
    note right of Locked
      Read-only. Never published,
      never on your site.
    end note

Locking a revision

Lock revision sits at the right of the editor’s header, where Publish sits on a site or documentation page. Clicking it freezes the page straight away — there is no confirmation and nothing to schedule:

  • the status badge reads LOCKED, in sky blue, and the version chip gains a padlock with the hover text Page is locked (read-only);
  • the formatting toolbar disappears, the canvas becomes read-only for everyone in the page, and the mode selector shows Locked: Readonly, as it does on a published page;
  • the page’s metadata is frozen too — Page settings cannot be changed until the page is revised;
  • the locked revision is indexed for content search.

Locking needs the same permission as publishing (page:publish, Content Publisher or above, or an override that grants it). If you can edit an internal page but do not see Lock revision, that is why.

Revising

On a locked page the button reads Revise. Clicking it opens the next version for editing at once: the version number goes up by one, the status becomes IN REVISION, and the locked revision is kept as a read-only record. Revise needs page:publish as well.

Reverting

While a revision is in progress (version 2 or later and not locked), Revert Changes appears at the bottom of Page settings. It discards the revision you are working on and restores the previously locked version, locked again. The confirmation dialog speaks of the previously published version; on an internal page it is the previously locked one that comes back. Like reverting a published page, it cannot be undone. See Revisions, Versions and Reverting.

A version 1 page that has never been locked has nothing to revert to, so the button does not appear on it.

What the version number means here

On an internal page, v3 means the page has been locked and revised twice — it counts lock cycles, not publishes. Nothing about an internal page’s versions ever reaches your site.

Over MCP

An AI client locks a page with lock_page. A locked page refuses body writes and metadata edits; to change it, call update_page_metadata with status: "IN_REVISION", which performs the same Revise as the editor and applies any other fields in the call to the new version. Locking a page that is already locked is refused. publish_page_now refuses an internal page with internal_page_not_publishable; schedule_pages_by_id and schedule_pages_by_source_id list any internal page among the refused ones with that code and schedule the rest of the batch. See MCP Tools: Publishing, Distribution and Users.

ESC