Working copy ability reference

Which edits draft-first stops, and which it lets through

Draft-first sits in front of the same three entry points as the approval queue (the MCP Adapter, the free plugin's REST shim and its MCP transport) and runs one step earlier, so a refused builder write never becomes a queued request. The list of guarded calls starts from every builder write the change ledger knows how to target by post, and adds the builders it does not map yet; where a builder accepts post as an alias of post_id, both are checked. A developer can extend the list with the wppilot_pro_draft_first_targets filter for a builder of their own.

Display-condition writes are deliberately not guarded. A condition decides where a template appears rather than what it contains, so staging it on a copy that nobody ever sees would prove nothing. The guard is aimed at page builder writes, so turning draft-first on is not a general content freeze; pair it with a safety profile or approvals when that is what the site owner wants.

The draft-first map guards the free plugin's direct gutenberg-write-content call by target_id or post_id. Queued Gutenberg composition has separate preparation and execution, and Kadence pattern insertion is a separate direct operation. Check each installed write path and its target requirements; this map is not evidence that every block edit passes through one guarded call. Elementor, Bricks, Divi 5, Beaver Builder and Oxygen writes are listed one by one, including page-level settings and, for Beaver Builder, applying a template to a page. An agent that receives the draft-first refusal should create the copy the message names, or reuse the copy id it gives, and repeat the same builder call against that id.

Posts a working copy cannot be made from

After a copy is published or discarded it is in the trash, and any further call on it returns wppilot_working_copy_trashed. If the original itself was trashed or deleted while the copy was open, publishing returns wppilot_working_copy_original_missing with HTTP 404, and the copy is the only place the new work survives: restore the original first, or publish the copy as a new page by hand.

• wppilot_working_copy_source_unusable: the source is trashed, an auto-draft or in inherit status, or it is a revision, attachment or menu item.
• wppilot_working_copy_is_copy: the id given is already a working copy. Edit it directly and publish it; copies of copies are refused.
• wppilot_working_copy_cannot_create (HTTP 403): the user can edit the original but cannot create posts of its type.
• wppilot_working_copy_yoast_unavailable and wppilot_working_copy_yoast_refused: the yoast-rewrite-republish mechanism needs Yoast Duplicate Post with Rewrite & Republish active, and that plugin only copies a published post that has no open copy. Leaving mechanism out uses GoBuildWP's own copy instead.

Undoing each working-copy step

Each step is recorded in the change ledger, and wppilot/rollback-change can reverse it while a before-image exists. Undoing a create moves the copy to the trash. Undoing a discard takes the copy out of the trash again. Undoing a publish restores the original from the snapshot taken just before the write, which holds its captured content, title, excerpt, eligible meta and taxonomy state. Sensitive keys and excluded derived caches are outside that capture; verify builder data and SEO fields after recovery. The exception is an original too large for the ledger to keep a before-image: the publish is refused with wppilot_working_copy_not_reversible, and repeating it with accept_irreversible=true publishes with no way back through the ledger, so take a backup of the original first. Changing the draft-first setting is recorded as a settings change and can be reversed the same way. See change ledger and rollback for how to find the change id.

Only the publish purges the page cache, and only for the original page, because creating and discarding drafts changes nothing a visitor can see. If a rollback of a publish does not show on the live page, clear the page cache for that URL by hand before assuming the restore failed.