Atlas Administrator Manual
A guide for maintaining a single atlas: editing its data, refreshing layers, building outputs, and publishing versions. It assumes you have admin access to your atlas's console.
This manual is deliberately scoped to running one atlas. Platform-level tasks — creating a new atlas, adding a new layer, debugging the email pipeline, infrastructure — are covered separately in the maintainer documentation, not here. See Where to Get More Help at the end.
For the read-only viewer's side (navigating the map, downloading data), see the User Manual.
Staging vs. Published
Your atlas has two kinds of state:
- Staging — the working copy. Every edit happens here, and it is always changing.
- Published versions — permanent, timestamped snapshots. Once created they never change. Viewers see the current published version.
The workflow is: edit in staging → refresh → build outputs → publish. The Admin Console is where you do all of this; the Versions section lists staging (on top) and every published version.
Editing Data
There are several ways to get data into a layer; use whichever fits the task.
- Draw and edit features on the map — add points, lines, or areas and fill in their attributes. See Draw Vector Features, Editing Layer Data, and Add a Private Note.
- Upload or replace layer data from a file — bring in a GeoJSON file. See Upload Vector Data and Replace a Layer.
- Edit in a spreadsheet — export a layer to Google Sheets, edit tabular attributes, and import it back. See Spreadsheet Workflow.
- Submit photos by email — field crews can email geotagged photos straight into a layer. See Email Photo Submission for how to submit and how to enable it for your crew.
Making Edits Appear: Refresh
Edits are stored as pending changes and applied to a layer when you refresh it, which also updates the webmap and other layer-driven views. Most editing surfaces apply your change right away; use Update to gather accumulated changes, and Rebuild only for source-backed layers you want to re-pull.
See Refresh a Layer.
Building Outputs
Publishing does not rebuild outputs. Lightweight ones (the webmap) stay current as you refresh; heavier ones (PDF runbook, gazetteer) are built on demand with the Build button next to each entry in Maps and Downloads. Build anything whose data has changed before publishing.
See Build an Output.
Publishing a Version
When staging looks right, publish to freeze a permanent, shareable snapshot. Publishing is an exact snapshot of staging — build any stale outputs first.
The Versions section also offers Rollback (repoint the live version to the previous one) and Reset Staging (discard staging changes, restoring from the current published version).
Advanced: Viewing Configuration
The Technical Console includes a configuration viewer/editor for inspecting your atlas's settings. Changes made there apply to the running configuration but are a live convenience, not the source of record — treat it as an inspection tool unless you know what you're changing. See View and Edit Configuration.
Where to Get More Help
Each section above links to a short how-to in help/. For anything beyond
running your own atlas — adding a new layer, creating a new atlas, email-pipeline
problems, or platform/infrastructure questions — contact your platform
maintainer (SCS). Those tasks live in the maintainer documentation, not this
manual.