Publishing & public URLs

Publish a whole space to the open web — no login to read. It's tela's blog/docs surface (these docs are a published space). For sharing a single page instead, see [[API & personal access tokens]].

Make a space public

The space's owner flips visibility from Private to Public in space settings ("Make public"). Publishing is whole-space — every page becomes readable at a clean URL; there are no per-page exceptions.

[!WARNING] Public means read-only to the world — it grants no write access, and only the owner can publish. Page frontmatter (props) is published too (a blog needs its tags/date/summary), so don't stash anything private there.

A published space also joins search and Ask for every signed-in user on the instance, not just its members — so publishing your docs makes them answerable in-app to everyone. See [[Search & ask your docs]].

When someone who isn't a member opens one of those pages — from a search result, or from a link you pasted — it opens in the public reader, the same no-login view a logged-out visitor gets. They don't need to be added to the space, and they don't hit a permission wall. Links you copy out of the app work for anyone once the space is public, so you can share a page URL without thinking about who's a member.

Posts & sections

On a public space's front page the top-level pages are the posts — newest first, the latest getting a featured card. A page that has children acts as a section: open it and its children render as a card gallery ("In this section") under its text, in your authored order. So a Slides page presents its decks as cards (cover + ▶ badge), and a multi-part article shows its parts — no hand-maintained link list. The left rail still lists the full page tree for direct navigation.

URLs

tela uses GitHub-style handle URLs (on the public instance, https://telawiki.com):

A space's handle is its owner account, not whoever created it. A space owned by an org lives on the org's handle — creating it doesn't put it on your personal home too. So an org's published space is at /{org}/{space-slug} only, and your personal home lists just the spaces you own yourself.

[!NOTE] Renaming a page never breaks its link. The number in a page URL is what identifies the page; the trailing text is only there to make the link readable. Rename the page and the text updates, while every link anyone already shared keeps working and lands on the same page.

Older URL forms still work and redirect: /u/{handle} → /{handle}, and the /public/spaces/{id}/… links you may have shared before. A page's /p/{id} permalink redirects to the public page when its space is public.

Drafts

Mark a page as a draft (••• → Mark as draft) while it's still in progress. A draft shows a Draft badge on the page and a small icon in the sidebar, and it stays off every public surface: it isn't listed or readable on a public space, in its feed or sitemap, and its share links don't open. Members of the space still see and edit it as usual.

When it's ready, choose ••• → Publish. Pages under a draft that are themselves published stay visible on a public space. Agents can create a page as a draft and publish it later (status on create_page / update_page).

Link previews for private pages

Paste a link to a page in a private space into Slack, Teams, Discord, iMessage and the like, and the preview shows the page title and space name (for a deck, its first slide), never the page body. That works for every link tela gives you: Copy link, Copy short link, and the URL in your browser's address bar while you're on the page. Links keep previewing after the page is renamed.

A link typed from a bare page number (/p/123) shows a generic "A page on tela" card instead, so nobody can list private titles by counting through page numbers. The link itself still opens the page for anyone who has access.

Discover

/discover lists every published space on the instance — sort by recent (latest activity) or popular (page count).

[!NOTE] A custom domain for a published space is not available yet — public spaces live under the instance's own domain. (Today's [[Custom domains]] are an org white-label door for the logged-in app, and are deliberately noindex — not a publishing surface.)