Publish your first catalog
In this tutorial you take a collection you have built, fill in a few entries with images, publish them, and grant your site permission to read them — so the same records your team works with appear publicly. By the end you will understand the two gates that decide what the world sees: collection permissions and entry status.
Requirements: a collection to publish (the one from build your first collection works), a role that can manage website connections, and a site of your own to display it. About fifteen minutes.
Having records is one thing; showing them to the public is another. In this tutorial you take a collection and make it visible on your own website — not by copying anything, but by letting the site read the records you already maintain. We will use a Products collection as the example.
Step 1 — Prepare the entries
Fill in a handful of entries properly, as if a customer will read them — because one will. A name that describes the product, a real description, a price, and an image chosen from the Asset Library.
Do this before publishing anything. It is much easier to finish a record while it is private than to fix a half-empty one that is already live.
Result: a few complete entries, all still drafts.
Step 2 — Understand the two gates
Before publishing, know what actually controls visibility, because there are two separate gates and both must be open:
- The collection gate. Your site is granted access collection by collection. If Products is not granted, nothing in it reaches the site no matter what state the entries are in.
- The entry gate. Each entry carries a status — draft, published, or unpublished. Only published entries are meant for the public.
Every "why is my product not showing" question comes down to one of these two. Result: you know where to look when something does not appear.
Step 3 — Publish the entries
Set each finished entry's status to published. Entries start as drafts by default, which is deliberate — nothing you create is public until you say so.
If a product should go live later — a launch date, a seasonal item — set its publication start date instead of publishing manually on the day.
Result: entries marked published, waiting for a site to read them.
Step 4 — Grant your site read access
Open your site's connection and grant it read on the Products collection. Grant only read: a catalog site displays products, it never changes them.
Leave everything else off. If you also want a contact form to create leads, grant write on your Leads collection and nothing more — not read, so the site cannot pull the lead list back. Details in how collections power a site.
Result: the site can see published products, and nothing else.
Step 5 — Check it, then change something
Load your site: the published products appear. Now do the test that proves the whole idea — change a price in the CRM, or unpublish one product, and look again. The change is reflected without exporting, re-uploading, or rebuilding anything, because the site is reading your live records rather than a copy.
Result: a working catalog fed directly by your CRM.
What you built
A public catalog with no second copy of the data anywhere. Your team edits products where it always did; visitors see what is published. The same arrangement extends to services, a directory, or listings — only the collection changes.
Where to go next
The full picture of Sonta behind your site is in using Sonta as your site's backend. If something published still does not appear, my entry does not appear on the site works through the causes in order. To have a new lead from the site notify your team automatically, see create and activate an automation.