Scheduling content
Set dates to publish or unpublish documents and HTML content.
How to schedule content
Scheduling content is especially useful if you know that your content is only relevant for a specific period of time. Telling the content management system (CMS) to unpublish content once it is no longer useful will keep the site from becoming cluttered with out-of-date information.
Scheduling content requires a little planning ahead of time. You can take any of these actions:
Schedule a date for new content to publish
Schedule a date for new content to unpublish
Schedule both dates
Schedule a time for a new draft of existing content to publish (only your latest draft would publish, not any earlier revision)
Schedule a time for existing content to unpublish
Watch video on scheduling content & documents (schedule transitions)
Note: Scheduling of a document and of a page are 2 separate things: If you have a page that links to a document, and the page is scheduled for tomorrow, and your intent is for the document to also become available tomorrow when the page publishes, you need to schedule the 2 things individually.
There are special instructions to schedule publishing and unpublishing of Alerts. Read more about this below.
Step 1: Click on the “Scheduled Transitions” tab from any document or page
The “Scheduled Transitions” tab only appears on content or documents that have been saved in Prepublished Draft, Draft, Unpublished or Published status. If you draft content and want to schedule it for publishing, you must save it as a draft first. There's no need for you to change its status from "draft" to "published."
Note: Make sure the parent page field is filled out before you schedule your prepublished draft for publishing.
Scheduling content and documents to publish works the same way, except that the Scheduled Transitions tab appears in a slightly different spot on the horizontal navigation bar.
For documents, the 'Scheduled transitions' button is after 'Edit' in the menu
For content pages, the 'Scheduled transitions' button is just to the right of 'Clone' in the menu
The number in parentheses in the tab refers to how many scheduled transitions have been set up for that page or document.
Note: You’ll find a dropdown called Scheduling in the box on the right side of the editing interface. This used to be where you would schedule publishing or unpublishing, but now it takes you to the Scheduled Transitions tab. So you can bypass the Scheduling dropdown.
Step 2: Begin scheduling your document or content
Once you click on the “Scheduled Transitions” tab, a blue bar that reads Add Scheduled Transition will appear. Click it.
Step 3: Execute transition, choose a date and time
Clicking on Add Scheduled Transition will result in a pop-up box appearing. It allows you to choose, via the Execute transition dropdown, whether you want to publish or unpublish. You’re also prompted to select a date and time to publish or unpublish.
Click Schedule Transition at the bottom of the pop-up box to apply those choices.
Step 4: Review scheduled transitions
Your scheduled transition will then display so that you can review it, and reschedule or delete the transition if need be.
All of your scheduled transitions will appear in this list.
Another way to review scheduled transitions
You can also review scheduled transitions across all your pages or documents by clicking on the “Reports” tab in the horizontal navigation bar near the top of the screen.
Scroll down to Scheduled Transitions, and click it.
This will bring up a screen in which you can filter for scheduled transitions by Organization, Label, Author, and Content type.
An example of scheduling content publishing and unpublishing
Let’s say your organization holds an annual contest where it awards prizes for the best photo of black-capped chickadees. You announce the new winners on Dec. 31, each year. You currently have last year’s winners published in an Information Details page, but you already know who this year’s winners will be. You create a new draft of your Info Details winners page, and tell the CMS to publish it on Dec. 31.
In this scenario, last year’s contest winners would be published until the end of Dec. 30. Then, last year’s content would be automatically replaced with this year’s content.
Note that publishing and unpublishing times are not exact as the CMS will only start the process when the time is reached.
The public may not notice the change for up to 35 minutes due to caching.
Scheduling Alerts
The publishing of Alerts is affected uniquely as a result of scheduled transitions given that they require an unpublish date to be set before they are published.
When creating an Alert you can access the “Scheduled Transitions” tab upon saving it as a draft. This lets you set an unpublish date up to 6 months out. You won't see the "Scheduled Transitions" tab until you save your content.
If you publish the Alert without setting an unpublish date, you’ll see a message on the screen telling you that it will unpublish in 14 days by default.
Click on the Reschedule transition link in that message and a pop-up will appear. There, you can reset the unpublish date up to 6 months out.
Click the Reschedule transition button at the bottom of the box to have your changes take effect.
The reason limits are put on such content is to help prevent it from getting stale. Authors receive email notifications when content is set to unpublish, giving them the chance to allow that to happen or refresh it if it should remain on Mass.gov.
Was this article helpful?
Last updated
