Draft and published

Vidext separates what you are working on from what learners see. You edit and preview a draft; an explicit Publish turns a verified snapshot of that draft into the published version.

The draft is your working copy

The draft is always there and always saved. Every chat edit — text, quizzes, scene order, imagery, narration — lands on the draft as you go (the status line reads Draft is autosaving…, then Draft saved). The draft is never shown to learners on its own, and it is not a version — it is the live thing you are editing.

Preview: see it as a learner

Preview turns the module canvas into the real learner player, playing your current draft — instant, with no publication and no navigation. It is how you QA a change before committing to it. Preview is a verb, not a state: you preview the draft or a published version. The same surface holds the module's version history, so checking what learners currently see and what you are about to publish happens in one place.

Presenter (avatar) video is deliberately absent from the draft. While previewing, the instructor may appear as a still image; the talking video starts rendering only after you choose Publish.

Vidext — Module

Publish: render, verify, then switch learners

Publish freezes the current draft as a candidate version, renders presenter video for the scenes that need it, and validates the complete result. Only after verification succeeds does Vidext point the module at that immutable version — and that pointer is what "published" means. There is no separate status flag.

During rendering and verification, learners continue receiving the previous published version. For a first publication, the module remains unpublished. A failed attempt never exposes a partial version.

• Publish starts the render-and-verify workflow for the current draft.
• Publish changes appears when your draft is ahead of the published version; the status line tells you how many changes behind the published version is.
• Retry publish appears if a publish failed.

When the published version is already up to date with your draft, the button is disabled and the status line collapses to the one useful fact — Published 3 hours ago.

No rollback, by design

Publishing only moves forward: there is no rollback to an older version. Previewing past versions from the history covers the "let me check the old one" need without letting you accidentally serve stale content. Picking a different version per course is also deliberately out of scope.

Courses release separately

A published module is a reusable building block; a course is a playlist that references live modules. A course has its own release state (draft → released → archived), and releasing it is a separate, explicit action, gated on every module in it being published. See The data model.

Why it works this way

• Trust: AI proposes; you decide. Nothing reaches learners without an explicit publish.
• Safety: learners always get a complete, consistent version — never a draft or a partial edit.
• Confidence: preview lets you review the draft before publication, while verification prevents an incomplete version from becoming live.