Automatically publishing your content or publishing to a schedule

This could also be titled, publishing content to a schedule because that’s exactly what I am going to talk about. As a bonus you also get the option of time limiting the publishing of your content, with the opportunity to also un-publish at a certain time.

Creating content is a dynamic thing affected by the vagaries of life, your mood and whether you have something to say or not. It may be that one day you are feeling particularly verbose and will shell out articles like the proverbial peas but you don't necessarily want to publish them all at the same time.

Alternatively you may have a particular regular publishing schedule, you could even just want a day away from your machine and want to prepare your material in advance but don’t want to release it quite yet.

The question is how do you do it, well it’s quite simple you use the Scheduler module. Download, install and enable this module. Update the content type settings to ensure the workflow call in the scheduler.

This adds a new field to your content entry form titled logically enough “Scheduling options”.

Simply compose your article and when you are finished enter the publication date in to the “publish on” field, remembering to take note of the formatting method.

Then you hit the publish button as normal and your article will sit there waiting to be published on the date you require. It does this by watching the date as part of the normal cron run, when the date has been reached and behold you article appears.

It’s just as if you were there, so give it a try.