Are you sure it appears on the published site? When you are logged in as admin you may be able to see archived / draft content automatically.

Try creating a page. hit save (is it still orange / yellow in the sitetree?) then logout then view the page with ?stage=Live in the URL - http://www.yoursite.com/page-thats-not-published?stage=Live

I'm having problems with this too.

It just doesn't seem right that you have to log out to see the live site. It's going to be really difficult explaining this to my client. If they want to compare a live page to a draft page, they need to log in, open up their page on the draft site in a new window/tab, then log out of the admin area, open up a new browser window or tab, and open up the page on the live site. Or I could ask them to add "?stage=Stage" or "?stage=Live" onto the end of any URL they go to while logged in, which is going to really confuse them.

Can't you just default the "stage" parameter to "Live" unless it's specifically set to "Stage"? That seems like it would really simplify this draft/live site comparing process.

Thanks!

Ok cool that will be easier to explain to the client. Thanks. I still think defaulting to the published site if "stage" isn't defined would make sense though ;)