Publish from Google Docs to the Web
A quick guide to publishing from Google Docs to the Web
Our Content Publisher for Google Docs is a powerful publishing tool that, together with a connected Website, can allow editors to control their publishing workflow of content to the site entirely from Google Docs and Google Workspace. This page explains the fundamentals.
When you first install our add-on for Google Docs, you’ll see the option to connect to our playground. The Playground is a shared website available to anyone using the add-on to experiment with the tool without having to connect it to a Website.
If you want to explore the functionality and the experience from a Content Authoring perspective, the playground is for you.
This should be the first thing you notice on the sidebar of the add-on when working on a document not yet published. Click “connect to playground”, and authorize the service to access your document, voilà.
Connecting a doc to the playground
We usually recommend previewing a document before publishing it. When you click on Preview at the bottom of the sidebar, we’ll launch a new browser tab or window that will allow you to see how your document will look like on the playground. Note that this is a real-time preview: if you keep the preview Window open, and edit the document, the preview will be updated automatically in close to real-time. For that reason, for users with large monitors, we recommend to use browsers side by side.
Real Time Preview on the playground
As long as you preview, the content is visible only to you or someone you shared the preview URL with.
- Your content will be automatically taken down after 7 days
- Your content is not visible to everybody simply but is still public. * don’t place any confidential or sensitive information *
- Metadata configuration on the playground is just an example, you can configure your own metadata fields on your own site. Components on the playground are just for example purposes, you can configure your own components on your own site.
Once you are ready to use the tool for real, you can connect your document to a live website and publish it on this website. A prerequisite is that someone in your organization has configured a Website so that it is technically connected to a live Website.
Note: by design, documents can only be connected to one Website. If you wish to publish the same document on two websites, you’ll have to connect it to the first website, publish it, disconnect it, and then connect it to the second website and publish it there too.
Very similarly to when connecting to the playground, you can click “Connect to a site”. By doing so, you will be presented with a list of all the sites that have been connected to your Google Workspace.
You can connect your document to any of these.
If you don’t see any site, ask your dev/it team to configure one, or do it yourself if you are confident with the technology. See our developer guide for more info on that.
As mentioned above on the Playground section, it’s recommended to preview a document before publishing it. The preview is real-time and continuously updated. If you use a wide monitor, we recommend to place side by side the Google Docs window and the preview Window. The preview can also be shared.
Your document is ready, you used the Preview and everything is looking good, you’re ready to make it available to your audience! Just hit “publish”, fill the metadata (these will depend on your Website configuration), confirm the publication by hitting “publish” again. You’re live and the add-on will open a new browser window with the content.
Content Publisher can be configured so that a collection requires approval of content being sent for publishing. This feature is known as the Approval Workflow.
When the Approval Workflow is enabled for your collection, the publishing process changes from direct publishing to a submission model. Documents sent for publishing will not go to the live site immediately, instead they will go into a queue “Pending Approval”.
Collection managers or administrators can review the content and decide to approve or reject the submission. When approved content can either be published immediately to the live site or placed in a queue “Pending Publication”. You’ll receive emails from Content Publisher keeping you up to date on the status of content all through the review process.
By design, a document can only have one pending submission at a time. If you need to submit changes to a document that is already awaiting approval, you must first cancel the original submission.
Here’s a demonstration of the workflow, from submission to final approval:
Content Publisher also has handy publishing options such as
- Checking the validity of your document for the Web
- Unpublishing
- Adding site components
- Access analytics
- Access site metadata for admins
- And more
Read on other pages of our documentation, or play on the playground to explore these advanced features.