Schedule publishing

Editors can save their changes to a page, an added page or a shared fragment now, and have them go live at a set date and time. A news article or an offer then appears when it should, with nobody there to publish it.

Nothing needs setting up. Scheduling works on every SunBird site, with either database.

Schedule changes

1. Open the page in edit mode and make the changes.
2. Choose Schedule... on the edit bar. For a shared fragment, it is on the fragment's own bar while you edit it.
3. Pick the date and time, then choose Schedule.

The time is in the editor's own time zone, as their browser reports it. SunBird stores it in UTC. A time that has already passed is refused: publish now instead.

Scheduling saves the changes at once, as a new numbered version. Visitors keep seeing the live version until the release time. A new page added from a template stays hidden, and out of <sb-sub-pages> lists, until then. Its address counts as taken from the moment it is scheduled, so no other page can claim it first.

See, change and cancel a schedule

• The edit bar says Changes are scheduled to go live with the time.
• History lists the scheduled version with a Scheduled badge and Goes live with the time. Cancel schedule cancels it. The version stays in history, marked Cancelled, and visitors keep seeing the live version. The scheduled changes become the draft, unless there already is one, so the editor can carry on with them and schedule again.
• To change the time, schedule again. The earlier schedule is cancelled, so a page or fragment has at most one schedule waiting.
• Unpublishing or deleting a page cancels its schedule, so it does not come back.

Editing today's page while a schedule waits

Edit mode always shows today's page, the version visitors see now, not the scheduled changes. The edit bar says so while a schedule waits. Save and publish changes today's page and leaves the schedule alone. Publishing an older version from History does the same.

At the release time the scheduled version replaces whatever is live, because it went live most recently. A fix published today is not in the scheduled version unless it was made there too. To change the scheduled changes, cancel the schedule, edit the draft it becomes, and schedule again.

A new page that has not gone live yet has only its scheduled content, so edit mode starts from that.

How a scheduled version goes live

Nothing runs at the release time and nothing is written to the database. The live version of a page or fragment is the one that went live most recently: a published version at the moment it was published, a scheduled one at its release time. Every read works this out from the clock.

Cached content (each page's slots, each fragment, and the tree of added pages) is kept only until the next release time it holds. The first view after that reads again. Every copy of the site sharing the database, such as staging and production, works out the same answer from its own clock. The site does not need to stay awake (App Service Always On) for a release to happen on time: the next visit after the release time shows it.

Note

Every copy of the site checks every 5 seconds whether content changed elsewhere, so a schedule made on one copy is known to all of them within seconds, and goes live on each at its release time.

History and version numbers

A scheduled version takes its number when it is scheduled. A cancelled schedule keeps its number, so the published versions have a gap where it was. See Drafts and history.