Preview of what changes have been made exactly to each component before publishing them

The library we are using in our company can be modified by several people in the team.

When I want to publish changes to the library, sometimes I would see changes I didn’t make. Or sometimes it was a change I actually made that had an impact on another component, but it’s difficult to understand right away given that you can’t have a close look at what has changed exactly (the preview is so tiny!)

It would be great to have some kind of before/after preview each time I hover one of the components in the “changes” list. It would reduce the risk of publishing wrong components that are not well built. Because right now I always have to ask my team if they have touched anything in the library which is getting tiresome to be honest.

Thanks :sparkles:

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When someone does some changes in the library and I want to publish those changes, currently there’s an option just to see the list of the components that have been changed, but not the details.

It would be much better if I’m able to compare old vs new and see the exact changes that are made. That would be useful both on publishing library changes and later inside the file where old components are being updated with the new ones.

Does anyone else feel that this could be useful?

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the review of changes in a published library is almost impossible in a controlled manner. right now, this feature is sadly as useless as the review of changes between the versions of a file. finding small changes is hopeless/impossible.

for this to work, each change must be listed/described in detail (if needed). look at tools like confluence or git to see how it should work. right now, every change is done in “blind flight” and requires manually checking every design for broken overrides etc.

i am working as a lone designer, i cannot even image how chaotic it must be in a larger team with multiple projects. no matter how good the design system may be, after some time, any project that derives from it must inevitably end in chaos and inconsistencies.

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Hi, I really need the ability to preview what changes have been made to components before publishing them also!! Several times in the last year, we’ve gone to publish our library and we see something in that list that we didn’t expect—but we have no idea of looking into it to see exactly what changed. I’ve got designers all over the globe helping to maintain this system, and even though only a few of us have admin rights to publish out a new library; it’s hard to tell if there’s something that wants to publish because someone accidentally clicked and shifted something in Figma a couple of pixels or because someone made a change to it in situ. I’ll be checking the revision history, but of course it lacks detail also.

In the example below I was really not expecting to see “buttons” in that list of modified components; but I can’t see by looking what’s changed in the buttons section of my component library. I can only see that it says it was “modified” but not how or when or by whom.

Ability to preview before publish would be a major enhancement.

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We definitely need a feature like this… a way to know what exactly what was changed and if that change was just something “under the hood” like an update made to the documentation, if something has been visually changed or if some kind of constraint was adjusted.

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this seems only possible when reviewing a branch, but it should be able to do the same comparison on the master before publishing.

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Agreed, this is definitely a needed feature for anyone maintaining a library with more than one contributor! Comparing to the currently published version would be so helpful!!

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I would like a way to preview changes that have been made to component(s) before I publish the library.

Why this might be needed: I work with a team of designers. All of us can make changes to our component library. I would like to check and review all changes first before I publish the entire library.

Here’s how I picture it could work:

  1. In this dropdown, I click on “Publish library…”
  2. In the Publish library window, there is a way for me to click on each component to preview the change
  3. There is a window for me to preview the change side-by-side, and I can go back and see the next item (Note: This UI can be the same as the one used to review changes when there are updates to a library)

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