Editing an article

Every finished article may be edited directly in RankYak. The article page is itself the editor: click into the text and start typing. Edits are saved automatically, kept in a revision history, and pushed to your site only when you choose to publish them.

Of course, you may also edit a published article in your own CMS instead. Keep in mind that RankYak's copy does not know about changes made there, so anything RankYak later pushes to your site, for example after an article refresh, starts from RankYak's version. Edits you would like to keep are safest made in RankYak.

The editor

The toolbar above the article covers the essentials: paragraph and heading styles, bold, italic, underline, lists, quotes, code, and undo. Selecting text opens a small formatting menu where you may also add or edit links, and typing / on an empty line opens an insert menu for headings, lists, quotes, tables, images, YouTube videos, and dividers. The first heading of the article is its title, so editing it renames the article.

Saving

Changes save automatically a few seconds after you stop typing, and immediately when you click away from the editor. The page header shows the save state, and afterwards a note such as "Last edit was 5 minutes ago".

Publishing your changes

Editing an article does not change your website immediately. When you edit an article that is already published, it is marked with an Unpublished changes badge and appears under the Needs republish filter in the article overview. When you are happy with the edit, click Publish changes to push the current version to your connected CMS; if you have webhooks enabled, a webhook is sent as well. Publishing runs in the background and typically completes within a moment.

If the project has no integration and no webhook, the button reads Mark as published instead, so you may record that you copied the changes over manually. For articles that have never been published at all, see publishing articles.

Revision history

RankYak snapshots an article's content before every refresh, rewrite, manual edit, and restore. After you have edited an article, you may open its history by clicking the last-edit note in the page header. Selecting a revision shows its changes as a diff against the current version, or as a full preview, and a Restore this version button reverts the article to it. The current version is saved as a new revision first, so a restore can always be undone. A run of consecutive manual edits shares a single revision, which keeps the history readable.

After restoring an older version of a published article, you should publish the changes to bring your site up to date.

Editing with the copilot

Sometimes you may wish to describe an edit rather than make it yourself. The copilot can rewrite sections, restore revisions, and publish the result on your behalf, using the same saving and publishing mechanics described above.