Hi friends 👋🏻

I have a rule where if I've been asked to do the same (or similar) thing three times or more, I should make some quick note to this particular folder in my OS.

Typically these requests come from clients or folks in my network. They might be requests for certain website functionality, or a simple "how does this work?" or "what should I do if this happens?" type question.

This does two things:

• It helps avoid me reinventing the wheel and doing research over again when I recognize a familiar question, and ...
• It gives me a place to add to what I already know, when I find a new resource or a better way to tackle the same problem.

This week, two clients gave me a list of content that needed to change on their respective websites, on a certain date in the future, at a time that I planned to be asleep 😴

I now have one of those notes for this situation ...

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⚡️ Making website content changes automatically, in the future

First I should preface this by saying it will be a bummer if your website is one a less feature-rich platform like Squarespace. Squarespace allows you to schedule a blog post to publish at a future date and time but that's it.

I'll obfuscate the two client examples a bit, but to illustrate the needs, let's say we need to:

• Publish some posts on October 1, at 12am
• Unpublish some other posts at the same time
• Make some edits to some already-published posts go live at the same time
• Update a section of content on an already-published page

In the past for websites I've managed, I've been asked to do things like this (a totally reasonable request), and I've either had to make the edits late at night before heading to bed, or had to wake up early to make the changes before the start of the business day.

Scheduling new content to publish at a future date and time is relatively easy across most platforms.

Draft your content, and instead of hitting publish right away, you pick the future date and time and schedule the content for publication.

But scheduling an edit to already-published content or scheduling already published content to unpublish ... that's more difficult.

As far as I know, there's no way to do this on Squarespace. (But I'm all ears if someone has figured out a way.)

For these clients' WordPress sites, I figured there has to be a way.

And of course, there is.

The tools I'm using for this magic are a pair of WordPress plugins from the same company:

• ​PublishPress Revisions​
• ​PublishPress Future​

Both of these are free, but also have more powerful paid pro versions that offer more complex functionality.

PublishPress Revisions

Revisions lets you create a "revision" of any piece of content (pages, posts, custom post types) that you can safely edit completely separately from the live content.

Once it's ready, you can save it and schedule the revision to replace the original version at a specific date and time in the future.

The plugin also has some great content workflow tools, like managing what user roles can create revisions and requiring them to go through approval by another user before going live. Awesome for more complex content teams.

PublishPress Future

Revisions is good for publishing changes to already published content, but it doesn't handle the need to unpublish content in the future. That's where PublishPress Future comes in!

This plugin allows you to set up "Future Actions" on individual content pieces, including:

• Publication status change (e.g. from Published to Draft)
• Adding or removing categories
• Sticking or unsticking content from the top of lists
• Triggering email notifications when changes take effect

With these two tools in place, I have a whole long list of changes scheduled to go live in the middle of the night while I'm peacefully sleeping 🛌

You can find the free versions of PublishPress Revisions and Future in the WordPress plugin library, and check out the Pro versions of Revisions and Future at these links.

If you are part of a team that publishes a lot of content and juggles a complex editorial calendar, these plugins and the rest of the suite created by PublishPress are well worth a look.

And if this kind of functionality sounds appealing but you're stuck on a more limited website platform, get in touch and we can chat about whether a website upgrade project would make sense for you. I'm currently booking projects to start early next year.

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