Front Page

[LeslieGabbert]

Why do I have to publish the front page? I am not ready to publish the course

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @LeslieGabbert,

I think basically Canvas is trying to prevent students from ever seeing a giant error message when trying to access the course.  If the course itself isn't published, publishing the home page will have negligible impact.  When you finally hit the publish button for the course though, having the home page published will ensure students can see the content at that very second.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[jdivince]

Canvas is telling me that Publishing my front page "is disabled."   Why? True, the course is not ready to be published yet, but this is a strange and poorly written "error message."  "Disabled?"  Why? I'm not seeing the logic here at all.

[chriscas]

Hi @jdivince,

Do you by chance have a screenshot of that message?  It's not one I'm familiar with.  It almost sounds like perhaps you don't have publish permissions from the course (that can very by role and is something Canvas admins from your school.institution can change).  Maybe the school is implementing an auto-publish script or something like that for uniformity and don't want teachers publishing the course.  This is just a guess based on my experience as a Canvas admin, but the screenshot would definitely be helpful to figure out if I'm on the right track or totally off.

-Chris

[jdivince]

Having looked at the Canvas Deploy Notes for April 26  I see what Instructure is trying to do. They are trying to save instructors from themselves (save them from accidentally unpublishing the front page of their course so that when they eventually publish the course, students don't get that big blooper page).  To put it another way, once you've created a front page that's a page, and once you've published that page, you can't UNPUBLISH it for the reasons you alluded to earlier. 

The pale green checkmark that applies to this scenario also applies to assignments: you can't unpublish an assignment that has student submissions.

Now, do I still wish Instructure would improve the message that appears when you hover over the faded green check markt?  Yes!