Publications and courses

Three addresses, three purposes

Publishing does not close the live room. When the group's work is done, also click “End class”.

Publish a class

1. In the class list, open Publish….
2. Choose the marked moments that will become the steps of the walkthrough, and rename them if needed. Moments are marked in advance, during the class: in the “History” panel click “Mark a moment”, enter a name and click “Mark”. Only the teacher can mark moments; if there are none, only the current notebook is published.
3. Check the code and output for data that must not be disclosed.
4. Click Publish and open the resulting page the way a reader would.
5. Share the /p/… link. If you like, give the address a short name.

The notebook as it stands at the moment of publishing is always included. Publishing again updates the material at the same link; ordinary edits to the live notebook do not reach the publication on their own.

What becomes public

The publication includes the text and code of the cells, plus the notes and output of the selected steps: plots, tables, messages and tracebacks. Readers can copy code and download the notebook of the open step as .ipynb: the file contains the code and text of the cells, without run output.

Who did what, questions to the oracle, terminal history and room files are not included. The exception is images from room files embedded in text cells: copies of them go onto the page. Only the room's main notebook is published; other notebooks from the Files panel are not part of it. But a name, a key or personal data already printed in code or output stays in the published text. Check every selected step, not just the last one.

The page asks search engines not to index it. This is not access control: anyone who has the link can open the material and pass it on.

Build a course

In the panel, open Courses and create a course. Give it a title and description, add classes and put them in the order you want. The “+ Add class” button adds classes that already exist. Until a class is published, the course page shows “not published yet” next to it.

“+ Planned topic” adds an upcoming topic: the topic is required, the week in the schedule is optional. Click “Add to plan” or press Enter; the form stays open for the next topic. In the panel such a row is marked “planned”. You can edit it (“Edit”), move it with the arrows, remove it (“Remove”), or replace it with a class that already exists (“Assign class”): the class takes its position, and the row shows the class name instead of the topic and week. Only classes that are not in the course yet are offered. The course page shows planned rows with their week.

Give the group the /c/… address once. As you publish classes, their material appears in the list. The course page does not reveal the addresses of live rooms: share the link to the current class separately.

Short and previous addresses

A publication or course can get a name made of lowercase Latin letters, digits and hyphens, 3 to 64 characters long, starting and ending with a letter or digit. For example, /c/python-autumn.

After a rename, the previous address keeps leading to the current material and stays reserved. Releasing the previous name stops the old link from working and lets the name be used again. Release it only when you are ready to change an address you have already handed out.

Take down a publication or delete a room

Once a publication is taken down, its page says so. Publishing and archiving do not change the permissions in the live room. By default, deleting a class keeps its published material; read the options in the delete confirmation carefully. Such publications are collected on the “Courses” page under “Pages without a room”: you can withdraw them (“Withdraw page”) or bring them back (“Restore page”), and the owner can delete a withdrawn page permanently.

A publication is convenient for reading, but it does not replace a server backup: it does not contain all the working files, configuration, secrets and room data.