Schedule change of content

[David Beesley]

Hi All,

We have a client with a requirement to change the content of one of their pages at midnight on a given day.

I understand there is a module for scheduling the publishing and unpublishing of entire pages, but his would require two separate pages and urls, not good for SEO.

Is there a way/module to schedule changes to a given field on a page?

[Marty Walker]

Was looking at something similar today. In my case I'm using this approach http://processwire-recipes.com/recipes/duplicate-content-between-fields/ to copy info between fields.

[arjen]

I would do it like this:

1. Duplicate field "field_name_new" and assign to template.
2. Let client place content in "field_name_new".
3. Create a PHP script (i.e. /public_html/update_field.php)
   1. Bootstrap ProcessWire
   2. Get the page
   3. Copy the value of "field_name_new" to "field_name" (setAndSave method)
   4. Remove the "field_name_new" field from template and delete field
4. Schedule a cron job which triggers http://yourdomain.com/update_field.php

[BitPoet]

A bit similar to @arjen's approach:

1. Duplicate the field as yourfield_replacement labelled "Your Field Label Replacement" and add it to the page's template
2. Add a new datetime field replace_after labelled "Replace field at" to the template
3. In site/ready.php, check if $page->replace_after <= current timestamp and $page->yourfield_replacement has content
4. If yes: replace $page->yourfield with the content of $page->yourfield_replacement, empty $page->yourfield_replacement and save page

This way, editors can edit new content in the added field and schedule replacement whenever they want. The replacement will happen the first time the page in question is accessed at or after the date+time in $page->replace_after.

You can make it a little more elaborate and safe by adding a checkbox to activate the replacement logic and reset it after successful replacement to avoid accidential replacements, which are likely to happen when editors hit "save" after changing the replacement content without having adapted the replace date first.

[arjen]

Nice @BitPoet, seems more elegant en better usable. How would you handle this situation where ProCache is enabled? 

[BitPoet]

I don't use ProCache (yet, since all the PW sites were highly dynamic ones and speed wasn't an issue so far), so I can't speak from experience, but with ProCache I'd likely set up a script in a (system) cron job instead of a ready.php snippet and interate through all pages with a selector like "replacement_active=1, replacement_date<=$now", then perform the replace as above and save. I believe ProCache should update the cache on its own after page save (correct me if I'm wrong).

[David Beesley]

Some cracking solutions folks. Cheers

[arjen]

59 minutes ago, BitPoet said:

I believe ProCache should update the cache on its own after page save (correct me if I'm wrong)

Depends on the settings, but by default: yes, a page save under a Pro Cache handled template updates the entire site.