CMS activity, health and change summaries
When a Site is connected to its CMS or site platform through a Flowpane connector, the connection tells Flowpane three different things. Each has a different meaning, and none of them is a public result on its own.
Flowpane governs the public files of any Site, whatever CMS, framework or hosting it uses. A connector adds evidence from the platform itself. The connection model, the health signal and the change summaries described here are the same for every supported platform; the Extensions Hub lists them.
Connection health
Flowpane contacts the connector for your Site regularly and receives a signed health answer. A healthy answer means the connector is present, still connected to this Site and working. It does not mean any content changed.
A quiet Site keeps a healthy connection for as long as it answers. Flowpane never treats a Site as stale because nothing was edited. If the connector stops answering, the connection moves to Needs attention on the Site's Integrations page.
The health answer also carries a source generation: an identifier that changes only when settings that affect your governed files change, such as site-wide indexing, routing and URL settings, robots.txt, sitemap settings or Flowpane-managed settings. Ordinary edits do not change it.
Change summaries
A busy Site can change hundreds or thousands of times a day, for example product, stock and price updates in an online store. The connector does not contact Flowpane for each one. It counts activity in a small, fixed-size summary on the Site, and Flowpane collects that summary on its regular health contact.
A summary contains counts by kind of activity, never your content:
- content edits
- publication and address changes (publish, unpublish, delete, restore or URL changes)
- product updates
- category and tag changes
- navigation and routing changes
- site settings, indexing settings and supported SEO tool settings
- add-on, module and theme changes
- robots.txt source changes and Flowpane-managed setting changes
The kinds a summary can show depend on what the platform exposes. A summary also says how many changes could affect a governed file, such as a sitemap, robots.txt or page indexing, and how many need attention. It stays on your Site until Flowpane confirms it received it, so a lost connection or a restart never loses activity, and a summary received twice is counted once.
On the Free plan Flowpane collects one summary a day. Paid plans collect summaries more often. Collection speed never changes your score: identical evidence receives the same score on every plan.
Priority events
A few conditions on the Site are important enough for the connector to ask Flowpane to look sooner:
- site-wide indexing was switched off, for example a setting that discourages search engines from indexing the whole Site
- the robots.txt source changed
- the Flowpane-managed sitemap stopped being served
A priority event is not a Change, a Finding or a score movement. It asks Flowpane to check the public Site.
From CMS activity to public results
When a summary or priority event says a governed file may have changed, Flowpane schedules one public check of the affected files. Many changes are combined into one check, and checks are spaced by plan (at most daily on Free). Only that public check can record a Change or a Finding, because public evidence is what search engines and visitors see.
Monitoring must be enabled for the Site; a Site with monitoring turned off is not checked automatically.
CMS activity is not a Flowpane fix
CMS activity counts what happened on your Site. It is shown separately from Flowpane Impact, which counts only verified Flowpane-assisted fixes. An edit you make in your CMS that resolves a Finding is an external resolution.
Daily CMS activity summary email
You can opt in to a daily email under Notification preferences. It covers the Sites you can view and lists, in order: what needs attention, changes that could affect governed files, verified Flowpane fixes and activity totals. It is sent only for days with CMS activity, once per person per day, and is available on every plan. It is off until you turn it on.
Connector versions
Change summaries and priority events need Flowpane release 26.10.003 or later of your connector. Earlier releases keep working and keep reporting connection health; the Site's Integrations page shows Update available with what the update adds. Flowpane never updates a connector automatically. Install the current release from the Integrations page; the connection is kept.
What this does not do
Connecting a Site does not give Flowpane permission to change it. Managed changes stay separately enabled, and every managed action still needs a person with the right role to approve it. Flowpane does not make automatic changes in response to CMS activity.