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Non-published components don't receive updates

  • April 28, 2022
  • 28 replies
  • 2516 views

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28 replies

Tom Turbo
  • New Member
  • July 16, 2026

@Tom Turbo I’m glad it’s working for you, but unfortunately, If you use instance swap or slots with your helper components, Figma will stop you from publishing the component because it “contains unpublished preferred instances” ><


Thanks for your feedback!

Is this what you’re referring to? I can publish this anyway and the instance swap works in the design file. It’s obviously not possible to switch to another hidden component like .Message since that one is not published. 

Any other voices?

Side note: We’re still not using the dot because we don’t fully trust it :) Our naming convention is to prefix base components with a tilde, like ~Button. That way, in assets panel and insert overlay, the base components are alphabetically sorted after all regular components. 


Julia57
  • Active Member
  • July 16, 2026

@Tom Turbo yeah sorry that’s what I mean, that you can’t use the helper components because they won’t be published. And if I publish it, it’ll show up in Assets even though its not meant to be used by itself like that.
The tilde is a really good hack!! I’ll start doing that too, thanks


Kingery_Michael

we’ve been hacking with adding orange backgrounds to subcomponents variant groups and purple to main component variant groups, but this breaks as soon as a component isn’t in a group. 

i was so excited to jump into slots and it’s just totally backfired on me because no i have to reveal hundreds of subcomponents that should never be used directly by an author but need to be linked and available by components.