Versions vs. starter templates
These two are easy to confuse, and the difference is when they act:- A starter template acts once, at the moment a Collection is created. It seeds the Collection’s fields, its first page design and some sample Items, and then it is finished — it never applies again, and there is no way to re-run it. See Starter Templates.
- A page template version is created every time you save this Collection’s page, from then on. It is the ongoing history of the design that the starter template began.
What versioning does and does not give you
What it gives you: saves are additive, so a save never destroys the previous state at the database level, and the design’s history is retained per Collection rather than being a single mutable record. What it does not give you today:- There is no version history screen. The editor shows the current number, not a list, and there is no way to browse or preview an earlier version.
- There is no restore button. An older version cannot be rolled back to from the app.
- There is no “copy this page to another Collection” action.
Copying a page design to another Collection
The route that does exist is a Collection backup. Exporting a Collection writes a JSON file containing its settings, its field schema and its active page template; creating a new Collection from that file brings the page design with it. That is also the closest thing to a snapshot you can keep on purpose: export a backup when a page design is in a state you would hate to lose. See Exporting a Collection Backup and Creating a New Collection From a Backup. Importing a backup into an existing Collection replaces its page design — which, consistent with everything above, arrives as a new version rather than as an edit to the current one.What is not versioned
- Per-Item overrides. An Item’s exceptions are stored separately and carry no version history at all; the only recovery from a bad override is to revert it. See Per-Item Page Overrides.
- Item data. Versions cover the design, never the field values it renders.