Publishing items in Horizon

When you edit or create new items in Sitecore, you must publish your changes before they appear on your website. This lets you save unfinished items and decide exactly when your changes appear on the website.

When you work in Sitecore, the items you save are saved to the Master database. When you publish new items or updated items, the items are copied from the Master database to a publishing target, and from the publishing target, the website is launched. The default publishing target in Sitecore is the Web database.

You can choose to publish a single item or you can publish an item and all of its subitems. Subitems are items that are nested under the current item in the content tree.

When you publish an item, the item in the current language version and all related items are published. Related items can be:

The Horizon editor uses Smart publish, which means the selected item is only published if it has changed since the last publication. When you run Smart publish, Sitecore compares the selected item in the Master database with the equivalent item in the target database and, if the item has changed, it is published. When you are publishing single items, Smart publish is a quick way to make sure that you publish all changes to a specific item and its related items.