The information in this blogpost may now be out of date. See the current GOV.UK content and publishing guidance.
We received some questions about the scheduled publishing feature, the answers to which are worth sharing with all admin users.
The scheduled publishing feature allows you to specify when a document will appear on the live site.
Remember that if you set a ‘scheduled for publication’ date, you must submit the article and it must also be reviewed and published by an editor. Otherwise it won’t appear at the scheduled time.
Content which has been scheduled and published will appear all around the site simultaneously at the scheduled time – there won’t be a delay because of the cache.
But what kind of changes can you make to documents after they’ve been scheduled for publication?
- If you have a document scheduled for publication and you notice an error in the live version, you cannot publish a change to the live version without affecting the new version that is awaiting publication. You can only have one unpublished edition and one published edition of a given document in the system. In other words you can’t have two drafts on the go.
- If you have a document scheduled for publication and you need to publish it earlier than the date you have scheduled it for, you need to edit it, change (or remove) the scheduled date and then make sure an editor publishes it.
Note that you can’t schedule things to publish at a time that is less than 30 minutes away (this is because of the CDN cache).
