Staging Changes

Staging is the process of capturing your content changes and associating them with a release. Instead of saving changes directly to the live store, you make your edits in Magento admin and use the MageDrop button's "Save & Stage" action to send just the changed fields to MageDrop.

The MageDrop button

Once the Limely_MageDrop module is installed and configured, you'll see a purple MageDrop button in the Magento admin on the following edit pages:

• CMS Page Edit — Content > Pages > Edit
• CMS Block Edit — Content > Blocks > Edit

The button appears in the top button bar, after the Save button. It's a split button with a dropdown containing three actions:

• Quick Preview — create a temporary preview of your unsaved changes
• Load from Release — load staged changes from a release into the form
• Save & Stage — stage the current form data to a release

How to stage a change

1. Navigate to the entity you want to edit (e.g. a CMS page).
2. Make your changes in the admin form as you normally would — update the title, edit the content, toggle the status, etc.
3. Do not click Save. Your changes should remain unsaved in the form.
4. Click the MageDrop dropdown and select Save & Stage.
5. A modal will appear — select the release you want to stage to and click Save & Stage.

If changes are detected, you'll see a success message showing how many fields were staged. The page will reload showing the staged values with a branded notice bar. If no changes are detected, you'll see a "No changes detected" message and the page stays as-is.

Only releases in Draft or Scheduled status appear in the release picker. You cannot stage to a release that is already live or rolled back.

How the diff works

When you click Save & Stage, the module doesn't send the entire entity to MageDrop. Instead, it performs a field-level diff:

1. Captures form data — the module reads the current values from the admin form (including any unsaved changes you've made).
2. Fetches current state — the module calls the Magento REST API to get the entity's current saved state.
3. Computes the diff — it compares the form data against the API response, field by field.
4. Sends only changed fields — only fields that differ are sent to the MageDrop SaaS.

This approach has several benefits:

• Minimal data transfer — only deltas are stored, not full entity snapshots.
• No conflicts with concurrent edits — if someone changes a field you didn't touch, your staged change won't overwrite it at deploy time.
• Transparent — in the MageDrop dashboard, you can see exactly which fields were changed and what the new values are.

Filtered fields

Certain fields are excluded from the diff to avoid noise and unintended changes:

Viewing staged changes

After staging, you can see your changes in the MageDrop dashboard:

1. Go to Releases and click on your release.
2. The Changes tab shows all staged items.
3. Click on any item to see the field-level diff — original value on the left, new value on the right.

Updating a staged change

If you need to adjust a change you've already staged:

1. Go back to the entity in Magento admin.
2. Make your additional edits.
3. Click Save & Stage again, selecting the same release.
4. The new diff will replace the previous staged change for that entity in that release.

Removing a staged change

To remove a staged change from a release:

1. In the MageDrop dashboard, go to your release.
2. Find the staged item in the Changes list.
3. Click the Remove button.

This only removes the change from the release — it does not modify anything in Magento.

What can be staged