Write & Publish

Obsidian: Connect & Publish

Connect Obsidian to your garden, publish a note, and read the Garden panel.

The Local Atelier: Obsidian

The sovereign way to publish to Standard Garden: your thoughts remain inside your local vault—plain Markdown files that belong to you forever—and the web garden acts as a luminous, live reflection of your thinking. File over app.

1. Connect your vault

Install the plugin: Click Open in Obsidian to jump directly to the installation screen, or open Obsidian → Settings → Community plugins → search for Standard Garden and click Install & Enable. (Prefer to install by hand or with BRAT? See the plugin’s GitHub page.)
Open Settings → Standard Garden → Account and click Connect to Garden. Your browser opens on standard.garden; approve the connection and you are sent straight back to Obsidian — no key to copy or paste.
The Account card now shows your @username, your garden’s address, an Online button (opens your garden) and Sign out, with four live figures: notes Local, notes Published, total Views, and your Last Sync.

2. Publishing & the double guardrail

To protect your privacy and ensure that personal journals, drafts, or work notes are never published accidentally, Standard Garden enforces a strict double security guardrail:

Important

The Double Security Guardrail
For any note to be visible and live on the web, both visibility: public (or unlisted) AND publish: true (or a valid scheduled date) are strictly required. If either key is absent, private, or set to false, the note will never be exposed.

Canonical Note Frontmatter

---
title: "My Note Title"
description: "A concise summary for RSS feeds and social cards."
permalink: "my-custom-slug"
created: 2026-09-19
modified: 2026-09-24
visibility: public
publish: true
cover: "/images/cover.jpg"
theme: forest
---

Publication Triggers

Once your note’s frontmatter is prepared, you can publish from Obsidian in several ways:

The Garden panel (the four-square Garden mark in the left ribbon, or the command Open Garden panel): the main interface, described in The Garden Panel. Its Publish / Sync button sends the open note in one click.
The Garden mark (four squares) in the note header (title bar): its color is the note’s status. Click it for a menu that explains that status and offers what fits it — publish, view live, pull a remote update, or unpublish. Before you connect an account, the same sprout is grey and its menu starts with Connect to Garden.
The Command Palette (Cmd+P / Ctrl+P): Plant seed (Publish current note), Tend the garden (Sync all notes), and the rest of the command list.

After a successful publication, the plugin stamps your note with garden-url: (its live address) and garden-short: (its short link), and locks the address in permalink: so renaming the file later never moves the note online.

Note

A note inside an ignored folder is never published, whatever its frontmatter says.

The full table of visibility × publish combinations is in the frontmatter reference.

3. The Garden panel

Open it with the Garden mark in the left ribbon or the command Open Garden panel. It always shows the note you are working on:

Header: the Garden name, your @username, a sync all button, and — when notes exist online that aren’t in this vault — a ↓ N counter (see Notes to download).
The note card: the note’s status badge (click it for the action menu), a visibility selector (Public / Unlisted / Private) and the main Publish / Sync button. After publishing: copy the live URL, view it online, share it.
Garden Profile Settings (only on your root note, permalink: /): display name, custom domain, brand logo, favicon, avatar, command launcher and the Mycelium network switch.
Roots: the unlinked mentions found in the open note, and two switches — Ghost links and Compost footer.
Mycelium: Hyphe’s inquiries and, for published notes, the live resonances from the network (see below).
Design: theme and design-token controls, with a Hyphe button to generate tokens from a sentence.

Click the status badge (or Options) in the note card for the actions that fit the note’s current state:

Action	When	What it does
Publish to Garden	not yet online	Sends the note.
Publish local changes	Modified	Updates the online copy.
Re-publish	Synced	Sends the note again.
Pull remote changes (overwrite local)	Outdated	Replaces your file with the newer online version.
Force publish local	Outdated	Keeps your version and overwrites the online one.
View online · Copy public link	online	Opens or copies the live address.
Share note	online	Opens a dialog with the direct URL, a ready-made Markdown link and an iframe embed code, each with a Copy button.
Sync all notes	always	Runs the synchronization.
Republish (set publish: true) · Remove from Garden (delete online note)	Unpublished locally, still online	Restores the note, or deletes the online copy.
Remove from Garden (unpublish)	online	Retracts the note after asking.

4. Unpublishing (clean & safe)

You can retract an online note at any time directly from your vault:

Click Unpublish in the Garden panel (note menu → Remove from Garden).
Or trigger “Standard Garden: Uproot seed (Remove from garden)” from the Obsidian Command Palette.

The plugin deletes the online note, sets publish: false, clears garden-url and garden-short, and never deletes your local writing.

To retract several notes at once, run Prune garden (Clean up unpublished notes). It lists what it found and asks you to confirm before deleting anything: online notes that are drafts in your vault, online notes with no file in your vault at all (for example written on the web and never downloaded — run Harvest seeds first if you want to keep those), and leftover garden-url stamps on notes that are no longer published.

Synchronize your vault — what a sync does, which side wins, folders to ignore.
Note status & colors — what each icon and color means.
Settings & commands — every option and command of the plugin.
Your garden’s front page — root note, custom domain, profile.