Thread

Quick question… I know I can schedule new content by putting a future date/time into the “Entry Date” and this works great but what about content updates.  Is there anyway to create a revision/update for a piece of content and have it replace a previous revision at a certain date/time?

Thanks!

Guy

What kind of content would you be updating that wouldn’t be stored in EE channels?

Yes it would be content stored in a channel entry.  What I’m asking is can I schedule a content update time/date for an article (piece of content)?

If you are accessing a URL with something like http://domain.com/template_group/template_name/title_of_some_entry there is not a native way to have EE update to a revision of that content however if you are accessing a page for something like an about page where you might have an about template group and are showing the index file in that group and your template code is something like

{exp:channel:entries channel="about" limit="1"}
some code here
{/exp:channel:entries}

When the entry date time that you set in the future was reached the new about entry would be shown.

Is this what you were trying to do?

No I know I can schedule new content what I am needing to do is schedule an update (or revision).

Let’s say you have a page about blue crabs… the page is a channel entry and currently has text like this:

“Based on 2009-2010 winter dredge survey data and estimates of Bay-wide harvest, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population and harvest continued at sustainable levels. Harvest remained below the maximum number that can be taken (53 percent).”

But I want to schedule an update to change the text to:

“Based on 2010-2011 winter dredge survey data and estimates of Bay-wide harvest, the Chesapeake Bay blue crab population and harvest continued at sustainable levels. Harvest remained below the maximum number that can be taken (XX percent).”

So it’s not a new channel entry rather and update of some of the content on a current channel entry.  I guess I knew that you could have revisions and wondered if you could make a future revision become live at a certain time?  For example the current page content/revision is replaced automatically on a certain date.

Thanks!

Guy

Hey eguystephens,

Thank to Justin for all the work here.

I am not aware of a native way to do what you are asking and I am not seeing anything over at Devot:ee.

I am not sure how you accomplish this to be honest. I can move this over to Development and Programming or the Community Help Forum if you would like.

Cheers,

Yes does seem like an opportunity for a plugin “Future Update” or something alone those lines.  Anyway thanks for the info sounds like a limitation at the moment and will need to work around it.  If anyone else has any ideas let me know.

In the “sorta-but-not-quite” category, I noticed these add-ons:

Better Workflow which let’s you have a draft version of a live entry while it awaits approval.  Reading the docs, I see no mention of scheduling the approval to go live, but you could check into that.

And NSM Publish Plus: Workflow appears to let you set review dates in the future when editors can be reminded to go and update an entry.

They may or may not be viable or adaptable to your situation.

I’m in 1.7.1 and I was really hoping that I’d discover this feature had been integrated into 2.x.  Apparently not.  :(

The way I get around this is just by using a conditional… (simplified)

if date > [time to update]
  [updated content]
if else
  [old content]

It only works in templates though, not in a Content Type (unless somebody knows a way around that?), which is not ideal obviously.  I haven’t spent much effort to make this workaround more efficient (hence why I’m only just now finding this thread), so I’d loooove to hear other thoughts on how to make this work.

I would GLADLY pay for this plugin, just fyi to any developers reading here. I constantly find myself needing this feature.

One way you CAN do this, in a round about way, would be to have two page bodies in your field group - basically old and new - and a date field associated with the “new” page body.  Then within the template that displays that content, use a conditional like:

{if new_date < current_time}
{new_body}
{if:else}
{old_body}
{/if}

Granted, that’s a cheat really and not actually updating the entry on the specified date, it’s simply swapping version one for version two.

If your content was accessed by template group or template name and didn’t reply on the entry’s URL title, then you could handle it with two distinct EE entries and simply expire one and publish the second at the same time.  But as soon as access to that content is dependent on the url_title segment, that doesn’t work because of the requirement that each entry in the same channel has a distinct url title, and so your url for entry 2 could not be the same as entry 1.

Sounds like you’ve come up with an interesting case for an add-on that stores a scheduled update to an entry.

Good thought!

Would love to see this kind of feature added.

Guy