You will have to publish with a WADL if you want the automatically generated documentation to show up, since that information is based on the WADL.
But you should be able to make the service itself visible without a WADL (just not on the documentation page). You just have to enable it.
If you want to add your own documentation, you can edit the main area of the documentation page in staging and add your own content there.
Hope that helps.
Michiel