Articles & the editor
How articles move from planned to published — and how to review, edit, approve, and export them.
Article lifecycle
Every article in IndexPine moves through a defined set of states. Understanding these states helps you know where to look and what action to take.
- Queued — the keyword has been approved and is waiting for the next autopilot run.
- Generating — the research, writing, and quality-gate pipeline is actively running. This takes 20–45 seconds.
- Draft — generation is complete. The article is ready for your review and has not yet been sent to your CMS.
- Published — the article has been delivered to your CMS and is live on your site.
- Decaying — IndexPine has detected a ranking drop of ≥3 positions over a 30-day window and has queued a content refresh.
- Updated — the content refresh has been published to your CMS to recover rankings.
Reading a draft
Click any article in the content list to open the full editor. At the top you see: the generated title (editable), the target keyword, estimated word count, and the detected reading level. The article body renders in a clean reading view by default.
Inline editing
Click anywhere in the article body to switch to edit mode. The editor is a standard rich-text surface — you can change words, restructure paragraphs, add or remove headings, and adjust lists. All changes are auto-saved every 10 seconds.
Citations and sources
Every factual claim that IndexPine sourced from an external page is marked with a numbered footnote. The full source list appears at the bottom of the editor. You can click any citation to open the source URL and verify the claim. If a cited page has gone offline, the footnote is flagged in orange.
Publishing manually
Click "Publish to CMS" in the top-right of the editor to immediately send the article to your connected CMS. IndexPine will upload the featured image, set the post status to published, assign the correct category/collection, and return you a direct link to the live URL.
Exporting articles
Use the Export menu to download the article as: Markdown (.md), HTML, or plain text. This is useful if your CMS requires a manual paste workflow or if you want to archive the content locally.
Autopilot vs manual approval
By default, Autopilot publishes articles directly without waiting for your review. If you prefer human oversight, go to Configuration > Autopilot and toggle "Require manual approval". Articles will stop at Draft status and you will receive an email notification each time one is ready for review.
Regenerating sections
If you are unhappy with a specific section, select the text of that section and click the "Regenerate" button that appears in the floating toolbar. IndexPine will rewrite only that section while preserving the rest of the article. You can regenerate a section up to five times before the article is published.