Skip to content

Publish

Publish lets you share a read-only view of selected workspace entities with people who do not have a Thrive account. You stay in control: sharing is opt-in, you can prepare a link before it goes live, and you can turn it off again without deleting the underlying entity.

This is different from schedule exports, which expose calendar streams as an iCal feed for other calendar apps. Publish is about sharing Thrive entities themselves—habits, docs, persons, and so on—as a web page anyone with the link can open.

What You Can Publish

Many entity types support publish. The common ones include:

Not every surface in the workspace is publishable. If an entity supports publish, the web app exposes controls for it (see below).

Draft And Active

Each published entity has a status:

  • Draft — you have created a share link, but guests cannot open it yet. Useful while you check what will be visible.
  • Active — the public link works. Anyone with the URL sees a read-only view.

Moving back to draft immediately revokes guest access. The link stays the same if you activate again later.

Where To Manage Publish

How you open the publish controls depends on what you are sharing:

  • Most entities (habits, chores, persons, individual docs, big plans, etc.) — open the entity in the web app and use the globe button in the leaf panel toolbar. That switches the panel to the publish section.
  • Smart lists — use the globe button on the smart list branch view (the list of items).
  • Doc folders — open the folder in Docs. A Publish section appears at the top of the folder listing.
  • All publish records — open Core → Publish in the left sidebar. This lists every publish entity in the workspace and lets you open one to see its status and public URL.

When a publish record exists, Thrive shows a public URL. That URL always starts with your site’s public published path and a unique id. You can copy it or view it in a new tab (when the publish is active).

Guests do not sign in. They only see what you published, in read-only form. They cannot browse the rest of your workspace.

If a link stops working, it usually means the publish was moved back to draft, the entity was removed, or the URL is wrong. Guests see a simple “not found” page rather than any private data.

What Guests See For Composite Content

Some published items include related content automatically. You do not need separate publish records for every child item.

  • Doc folder — publishing a folder also shares its subfolders and docs. Guests can browse the tree and open individual docs inside it.
  • Schedule stream — guests can open the stream’s calendar and drill into in-day and full-day events that belong to that stream.
  • Smart list — guests can open items that belong to the published list.
  • Metric — guests can open entries that belong to the published metric.

Publishing a parent does not create extra publish entries for children; access is implied by the tree you chose to share.

Security And Privacy

Treat the public URL like an unlisted link: anyone who has it can view the active publish. There is no separate password on the link.

Only share entities you are comfortable showing read-only to others. Do not put secrets in notes or fields on entities you plan to publish.

For a step-by-step walkthrough in the web app, see Share an Entity.