website_redirect_button

Models that can appear on the Odoo website, such as products, courses, events and job positions, carry an is_published boolean from website.published.mixin. Rendered plainly, that field is just a checkbox. The website_redirect_button widget renders it as a status button in the form header instead: it reads Published when the flag is true and Unpublished when it is false.

The part that surprises people is the click behavior. The button does not toggle publication. It fires the record's open_website_url method through the standard view-button machinery, which redirects the browser to the record's public page. In other words, it is a labeled shortcut from the backend form to the frontend page, with the publish state as its caption.

For teams that manage content in the backend, the constant question is "what does this actually look like on the site?" This widget answers it in one click from the form header, without hunting for the URL or switching to the website editor first.

The label doubles as a status check. An editor reviewing a batch of products or course pages can see at a glance which records are live before jumping to them. Because clicking never changes the publish state, there is no risk of accidentally unpublishing something while checking it, which is exactly the mistake a raw boolean toggle in the header would invite.

If your own model should appear on the website, the practical takeaway is that this widget is the visible end of a larger pattern: inherit website.published.mixin, and the field, the URL computation and the redirect method all come with it.

The core pattern, from website_sale

<span id="button_website" position="before">
    <field name="is_published"
           widget="website_redirect_button"
           invisible="not sale_ok"/>
</span>

This is how the product form shows its Published button only for saleable products. The field sits in the form header area, which is where the button styling belongs.

On your own website-published model

# Python: the mixin provides is_published and open_website_url
class LibraryBook(models.Model):
    _name = "library.book"
    _inherit = ["website.published.mixin"]

<header>
    <field name="is_published" widget="website_redirect_button"/>
</header>

Without the mixin, or at least a working open_website_url method and a website_url compute, the button renders but the click fails on the missing method.

The component is 28 lines, and all of its behavior comes from delegation. The label is a getter that reads the field value and returns one of two translated strings. The click handler calls this.env.onClickViewButton with type: "object" and name: "open_website_url", passing the record's context, eval context, model and ids, exactly as if you had declared a <button type="object"/> in the view.

That delegation has a practical consequence: everything a normal object button does still happens. Unsaved changes prompt the usual save flow, access rights on the method are checked server side, and the returned action, normally an ir.actions.act_url pointing at website_url, is executed by the action service. The widget is best understood as a field-shaped wrapper around a standard smart button.

Note the asymmetry with the neighboring Go to Website button that many of these forms also have: that button is a plain view button, while this widget adds the live Published or Unpublished caption on top of the same redirect.

Odoo 20 is expected at Odoo Experience in Brussels, 24 to 26 September 2026. The notes below are read from the public development branch, which is unstable and can change until feature freeze. We re-verify this page against the shipped release.

The development branch adds a third state to the label: when the record has a truthy publish_on field, the button reads Scheduled instead of Published or Unpublished. That lines up with scheduled publishing landing in the website stack, and it means the widget will report three states from the same boolean field plus the new date.

Internally, the click handler moves from env.onClickViewButton to the new useViewButtonHandler hook. Behavior is unchanged, but a JavaScript patch that overrode onClick will need a fresh look after the release.