website_publish_button

Publish state in Odoo's backend is shown on a form's button box, and this widget is the oldest way core renders it. website_publish_button is a component with a template and nothing else: no options, no supported types declared, no click handler.

The template renders two stacked spans over the boolean value. The not hovered span states the fact: Published in green when the field is true, Unpublished in red when false. The hovered span states the action you are about to take: Unpublish in red when currently published, Publish in green otherwise. The flip between them is pure CSS through the o_stat_info hover classes, which is why the widget only makes visual sense inside a stat button.

The toggling is the wrapping button's job. Both core usages are <button name="website_publish_button" type="object"> around <field name="is_published" widget="website_publish_button"/>: the button calls the method, the widget repaints the label from the updated field.

For anything sold or shown on your website, the publish flag is the last gate before the public sees it. Surfacing it as a large stateful button on the backend form means a product manager can check a shipping method's visibility while editing it, without opening the website. The hover flip is a small piece of UX honesty: at rest the button reports, under the cursor it warns you what clicking will do.

The pattern is worth copying on custom published models, a course catalog, a dealer directory, a careers page, because it reuses the exact mental model your team already has from products and shipping methods: green means live, hover to see the action, click to flip.

The complete core pattern

<button name="website_publish_button" type="object"
        class="oe_stat_button" icon="fa-globe">
    <field name="is_published" widget="website_publish_button"/>
</button>

Verbatim from the shipping method and forum badge forms. The outer button carries the method name and the globe icon; the inner field is only the two-state label.

On a custom published model

<!-- model inherits website.published.mixin -->
<button name="website_publish_button" type="object" class="oe_stat_button" icon="fa-globe">
    <field name="is_published" widget="website_publish_button"/>
</button>

Inheriting the mixin gives you the method, the fields and the rights checks; the view snippet gives you the standard button.

The naming collision deserves one careful paragraph, because it trips developers constantly: website_publish_button is simultaneously a widget in the fields registry and a method on website.published.mixin. In the XML above, the name on the button refers to the method; the widget on the field refers to the component. They are wired together only by convention, and either works without the other: swap the inner widget for a plain boolean and clicking still toggles; remove the outer button and the label still renders, inert.

The mixin method itself is three lines: ensure one record, write website_published to its inverse, return the new value. The interesting behavior is in the mixin's write, which raises for users lacking publishing rights, so the button is safe to expose broadly. Note also what the widget does not check: can_publish is never read client side, so users without rights see a clickable button and get the access error only after clicking.

Finally, scope: newer core code renders most publish toggles with standalone components on list and kanban views. This widget remains the form-view, stat-button variant, which is why its core usage count looks so modest next to how often you see publish toggles in Odoo.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. We read the widget's files on the public development branch at the time of writing; the branch is unstable and can change before release.

No functional changes: the JavaScript is byte-identical to 19, and the template only swaps t-esc for t-out plus the new explicit this. prefixes, part of the framework-wide template migration. Views and patches keep working. We re-verify once Odoo 20 ships.