The DatoCMS Blog

Scheduled publishing, the perfect way to manage your content during Christmas

Posted on December 13th, 2018 by Francesco Falchi

Christmas is not here yet but DatoCMS has already a gift for you, Scheduled publishing. It happens more often than not that you might want to publish one of your records but you aren’t available at the time you want to publish it. It’s probably going to happen during vacation time like Christmas. Fear not because from now on you can set up you records publication even if you’re not there to press the “Build now” button.

How to set up a Scheduled publishing

We’re going to create two simple articles and schedule the publishing of the first one during Christmas and the second one for the new year. To start we’ll create a “Festivity” model.

Some of the fields you might need for your related to festivities model

Remember to enable the draft/published system in the additional setting of your model.

You need the draft/published system to be active to be able to use the Scheduled publishing

Now we can move on to create our records.

When we save it we have our New year post ready but nobody will be there to publish it at 12AM of the first of january. We can set our scheduled publishing to be sure the post will be out.

Setting up the publication date is really easy

You’ve probably noticed that the publication time is set to GMT(London) because that’s the time set on the Global project settings of our project, but our computer is actually in a different time zone. Keep that in mind if you’re working remotely or in a different timezone than the the one set in the project.

In our case we’re at GMT +1, we’ve set the publishing an hour earlier. If we were in London the notification about the Timezone would not show up

You can check the release time in your collection by selecting the “Scheduled publishing at” in your Tabular view.

Your environment is part of the process

If you’re using our CDA client side (with React, Vue, Angular, you name it) or your DatoCMS project is server-side (using Rails, Node.js, Elixir, PHP or any other solution of your choice) and it’s using our Content Delivery API, the records will be available at the scheduled time. Otherwise if you have a static site project, the last step is to enable Scheduled publishing in our environments so that they can deploy properly.

Remember to select the right environment if you have more than one!

A request from the future

Many projects might need more than a single record to be released at the same time, for example if you have magazine that is going to release several article a specific day per month. In the near future DatoCMS will expand Scheduled publishing capabilities to enable the release of several records at the same time.