What it means
Content systems grow overlapping kinds of visibility: a draft flag, a scheduled state, a preview mode, a staging server for templates. Each is a mechanism of its own, and they interact badly. Loam has one lifecycle: two layers, draft and live, for everything — content, templates and files alike. There is no third state.
How loam does it
- Preview is the whole site. A preview link shows the live site with your drafts on top — every page, every overview, the search — in the place publishing will give them.
- A check with teeth. Publishing judges the live site plus this draft before it exists. A draft that would break the site does not go live. A take-back that would leave broken links is refused. Nobody skips the check.
- Templates included. A new template is a draft like any other change, previewed on the real site and refused if it does not parse. The draft layer is the staging environment.
- Reversible until the last step. Something wrong on the live site goes back to draft, to be fixed or dropped. Removing for good takes two steps — and the file is still in history after both.
What it costs
The draft layer is shared, not private: a colleague who may publish can publish your draft. Loam chose collaboration over exclusion on purpose, and the check on publishing makes that safe. If you want a private sandbox, history is the fallback — not a personal workspace.