WalkInto restricts sharing and embedding of tours to external sites only when a tour is in 'Published' status.  When you publish a tour, WalkInto keeps a safe copy of that tour in read only mode.  All your further edits will not reflect on the 'Published' url till you again choose to 'Publish' it.  This helps you safely edit a tour without corrupting the live version.


In this post we will show you how to create a public URL (published) for your tour and also have a copy of it in editor (Draft) for further edit.


Log into your dashboard and open an existing tour or create a new tour.


Here, we are going to create a new tour and explain how the publish feature works.


Dashboard View





In the above view you can notice that my previous tours are published and the new tour named "Publish/Unpublish" is not. The eye icon will show you the preview of the tour state that has a public URL. The icon to the right corner is the Unpublish button. You can unpublish a tour at any given time.


Once in the editor create your tour. By default this tour will always be unpublished, meaning this tour will not have a public URL.


To make it public and get a public URL, you need to Publish the tour. 


Click on the Publish button on the top bar to publish the tour.



Clicking on the publish button will prompt a message for your approval.




Click on Green tick to approve or red to cancel the action.


Once you approve for the tour to get a public URL, a successful message will prompt and you will get the link to the tour as well. 



You can click on the "here" to access your publicly available published tour.



You can see that this is the viewer mode and the tour is publicly available. 


I will create a tourcard in the editor now to show the difference between the published and unpublished tours. 



At this point the tour is in two states. One is the published state and the other is the unpublished state.


You can preview the tour to see the unpublished tour by clicking on the preview button on the editor.



You can see that it is mentioned that this is "Only for preview". The changes made in the tour will not reflect in the published tour until you hit the published button.


Let me show you the change by clicking on the publish button.


Previously published tour.                                                                                 


        


 Latest published tour.


You can clearly see that the new viewport tourcard that we added is visible on the published tour. 


Using this feature you can create a public URL for your tour, embed it, share it just like you did earlier. But now you can go back to the editor and make changes to the tour without affecting the published tour. Only when you are 100% sure about your tour being ready click on the publish button and update the changes onto the currently published tour. 


You can simply click on the Unpublish button provided on the dashboard to take away the public URL.





In case someone already has the link to the tour, clicking it will prompt an error message.