Templates Create Drafts, Never Live Pages
Applying a Knowledge template inserts every page as an internal-visibility draft — a deliberate safety choice worth stating plainly.
A template gallery is a convenience feature until it publishes something to your live, customer-facing docs site without you meaning it to — at which point it's a real risk. Knowledge's template system is built specifically to avoid that failure mode, and the design decision behind it is stated directly in the code itself, which is unusual enough to be worth repeating plainly.
What applying a template actually does
When you apply a template, every page it creates is inserted as a draft, with visibility: 'internal' set explicitly. None of it goes live automatically — not the first page, not any of them. The product's own reasoning, quoted directly: a template is a starting point an author reviews and publishes themselves.
Why this is the right default, not an inconvenience
It would be entirely possible to build a template system that publishes immediately — arguably faster to use, in the narrow sense of fewer clicks. But a documentation platform that lets a template gallery silently push content live to a real, public-facing site skips the one step that actually matters: a person deciding this content is accurate, on-brand, and ready for a reader before it becomes reachable by one. Templates are a starting point precisely because starting points are supposed to be reviewed before they're treated as finished.
What this means when you use a template
Expect to see draft, internal-only pages after applying a template — that's not a partial failure or a step you missed, it's the intended and complete result of applying it. The follow-up step is yours: read through what the template generated, edit anything that needs to reflect your actual product or business rather than the template's generic placeholder content, and publish each page deliberately once it's ready. If you apply a template and nothing appears on your live site, that's the system working correctly, not a bug to report.
The broader pattern worth noticing
This is a small feature, but it's a useful signal about how Knowledge is built more generally — favoring an explicit, deliberate action before something reaches a live, public surface over a convenience shortcut that skips it. It's the same instinct behind AI search failing with an honest error instead of guessing, and version restore snapshotting your current state before replacing it. None of these individually is dramatic; together they describe a product that treats "did a human actually mean for this to happen" as worth protecting even when it costs a click.