Publishing, going public and deleting a flow
What the publish wall checks, what the profile switch adds, and what delete really does.
01Publish is the wall
Publish checks the whole graph at once and lists everything wrong as issues you can act on: exactly one trigger, between one and ten stages, every stage placed and reachable from the trigger, at most one path between any two stages, every terminal stage stating its outcome, every step still available and fully configured, no wire routing into the trigger and no output wired twice. It also checks the forms the flow collects: a question that cannot be answered where it lands — a booking time with no sessions, a member pick with nobody offerable — is refused by name, before any customer can meet it.
02Save, then publish — then Save is the publish
The first Publish is refused while the draft has unsaved changes — it would otherwise publish the last saved flow rather than the one on screen. Save, then publish. Once a flow is live there is no second act: every Save re-runs the publish checks on what you saved, and anything they refuse comes back in the banner while the save itself still lands.
03Published is not public
Publishing makes the flow live and internal: it runs, staff use it, and it appears in every internal picker. A separate On the profile switch in Flow settings puts what the flow takes in — its offerings and forms — on your public page. Only the intake is ever public. The steps, the board and the run history stay private, and turning the switch off leaves the flow running exactly as before.
04Payment is advice, not a gate
A flow that sells something publishes whether or not a payout account is connected. You are told that orders from it will need their payment recorded by hand, and that is all — payments is a product you can adopt later, not a condition of going live.
05Deleting
Deleting a flow archives it: its items and run history are kept, the flow leaves the picker and stops accepting work. A stage is guarded the same way while editing — one that still holds items refuses to be removed until you move them to another stage, and the refusal says how many are waiting.