Publishing

Publishing puts your saved map online at its own address, so other people can open it without an ALIGN account, without the Map Builder, and without a copy of your data. The map stays yours: what you publish is a view of the web map you keep in your Datastore.

The Publish button sits at the far right of the header bar, next to your account button. It reads the state from the server rather than guessing, so its label tells you where the map stands: not published yet, published, published with unsaved changes, updating, or suspended.

Save first

A map that has never been saved has nothing to publish. The dialog says so and offers to save it for you. Everything published afterwards follows your saves, so publishing is always one step behind the Save button, never ahead of it.

Choosing your audience

The audience answers one question: who may open the published map.

Audience	Who gets in
Private	You and your organization’s admins.
Groups	Members of the groups you pick.
Organization	Every member of your organization.
Public	Anyone with the link, no ALIGN account needed.

This is not the same knob as sharing the project. Sharing decides who can open the map in the Map Builder and change it. The audience decides who can open the published map and only look at it. Two questions, two settings, on purpose.

The address

Your map gets its own address on ALIGN’s publication host. You propose the last part of it, ALIGN checks whether it is free while you type, and tells you before you publish rather than after.

What the check tells you before you publish

Before anything goes online, ALIGN inspects the map and reports what publishing would mean. Three findings matter:

• Layers that your audience could not read. This one blocks publishing, and the dialog names the layers. Publishing a map whose data stays private would put your visitors in front of empty layers, so ALIGN offers to share those layers with the same audience instead of failing silently.
• Editing widgets are left out. The feature editor and annotations are authoring tools, so they are not carried into the published map.
• A basemap that uses your own provider key. The key never travels with the map, and your provider needs to allow the publication address before the basemap will draw there. Integrations explains where those keys live.

You can also open a preview as published at any point, which shows the saved map exactly as a visitor will meet it.

Once it is live

The published map follows your saves. Save the web map and the publication updates itself, which the dialog reports as Updating for the moment it takes, then Live again. There is no second publish button to remember.

From the same dialog you can copy or open the address, change the audience (the server re-derives who may enter), and decide whether search engines are allowed to index the map. Indexing is a choice, not a side effect of being public.

Embedding it on a website

Embedding is a second, independent dial. The audience says who may see the map; the embedding allowlist says which websites may frame it. You choose between not embeddable, which is the default, any website, or a list of sites you name, and ALIGN gives you the iframe snippet to paste.

Two limits worth knowing, because they are properties of browsers rather than of ALIGN:

• The rule is enforced on the page doing the framing. It prevents your map from being framed elsewhere, it does not prevent someone from opening the address in a tab.
• A map that is not public cannot be embedded on another website. Its visitors would meet the ALIGN sign in, and browsers do not keep a session inside a third party frame.
• Use a plain <iframe>, without the sandbox attribute. A sandboxed frame blocks the map outright unless it grants a full set of permissions — including allow-downloads, which the Print widget’s PNG and PDF exports need to reach the visitor’s computer.

Sharing with people outside ALIGN

A share link opens this map for someone who has no ALIGN account, until it expires or you revoke it. Send it by email and each recipient gets their own link, revocable on its own, the way you would share a document person by person. Each link also comes with its QR code.

Two things a link of this kind owes you: whoever holds it can open the map, and it is not the right tool for sensitive data unless you give it a short life. A public map needs no link at all, so ALIGN offers the QR code of its address instead.

Taking it offline

Unpublish takes the map offline immediately and every link in circulation stops working. The address stays reserved for this map for a while, so publishing it again gets you the same one back. ALIGN spells this out and asks you to confirm, because it is visible to everyone you shared the map with.