Schedule publishing#338

I would like to be able to schedule the publishing of a new page directly in the dialogue where to select the status of a post like in this mockup:

I think the most flexible solution for this would be a feature that allows to display custom fields for each selected status. Then you could also e.g. display a “requested reviewer” user field for the “In Review” status. All fields would be stored in the content file like normal fields, so they can be reacted on in hooks and when rendering templates.

Does this also apply to content you publish with a ‘publish date’ in the future? I have some websites where I can do this, then the status becomes ‘not published’ until the set publish date is reached, then the status automatically changes to ‘public’ and then the item becomes visible (mostly used on list or category pages, e.g. for news articles).

But adding a status ‘planned’ for this would be nice, I think.

@G.J. Buth Kirby’s status system currently allows the options “draft”, “unlisted” and “listed”. They can be renamed and customized, but it is not possible to add additional options. So with this proposal you would set the page to “Published” (= listed) with a given publish date. This also ensures that the page is automatically displayed at that time. Otherwise a cronjob would be needed to actually process the status change from “Planned” to “Published”.

@Lukas Bestle If currently it is possible to automatically switch the status from unlisted to listed on reach of a publish date that is in the future, what difference does it make if this has to be applied to an extra status ‘planned’?

From that perspective I don’t see the issue here that you mention. But on the other hand, I’m not a programmer, just a content manager who likes to improve systems. So it’s very well possible that I overlook things which are clear to programmers why they are technically not possible or too hard to achieve, with too little benefit.

@G.J. Buth It is technically not possible to automatically switch the status at a given time. You would need a program that runs at exactly that time that will do the switch for you.

So the most robust solution is to already set the status to “published”, but add special handling to the frontend templates so that they can hide the pages with a publish date that is still in the future. This way, the pages will appear exactly on their publish date.

@Lukas Bestle: I suppose that’s how it works now on our websites.

The surprising thing is though that I do initially set the status of news articles (on a list page) to ‘published’, but with the publishing date still in the future this status is stored as ‘not listed’. And it switches to ‘published’ on the set date/time (in the list the blue status bullet becomes green), so this suggests to me that it must be possible somehow.

It’s certainly possible to display the status like this to the user, but not possible to automatically change the status directly in the file system.

Making the displayed status in the Panel dynamic would be a separate feature though as it would require changes to how the Panel deals with the page status.