How public visibility works
A retained source, a published page and a searchable result are different states.
For a page to resolve publicly, it needs the page and publication tags, a valid route and unambiguous logical identity and type. Draft, retired or mixed-kind assets are ineligible. Templates are read internally by the renderer, not offered as public raw assets.
Commit preserves the immutable source. Publication changes how Everything interprets its tags. Ingestion and search-family publication determine what the indexes can currently retrieve. These events are related but not simultaneous.
Page reads select an eligible published route winner and use the tags returned by that selection. They do not reread page/template tags around rendering. An edit during the request may finish the selected response; a later request selects again, subject to index visibility. Search uses the public/filter tags in wf-store’s enriched response and deduplicates locally, without checking every result again. An older revision or publication state can remain visible until that response metadata catches up; opening the link makes a new page selection. None of these operations promises an atomic snapshot or instantaneous convergence.
A new page may be absent from browse or search briefly. An unpublished or retired page should cease to qualify, while an older result may be discarded during hydration. Changed metadata or unavailable dependencies can cause an explicit temporary failure.
When diagnosing your own page, use its known ID and route. Check tags, source and progress once, then give visibility time to catch up. Do not treat a search miss as proof that the upload was lost.
Page source bytes can be reused by immutable asset ID. Successful template selection and layout are separately cached without time expiry, so active-template edits can stay stale until eviction or instance replacement. This is an intentional presentation tradeoff, not cached owner authorization. See Caching and freshness.