Scheduled posts

[formmailer]

Hi,

I need to schedule some posts/articles (both start and end date). What would be the best approach for this?

I was thinking about a (lazy)cron job calling a page that changes the status of the page based on the current date.

Would this be a good solution or is there a better way?

/Jasper

[apeisa]

I have similar need, but I am going with simpler template based approach:

I check for dates and redirect to "Page not available" page if article is not published (and you don't have edit access). Only drawback here is that you have to remember to check those dates also when doing lists and searches. Normally that is not a problem, since I use same functions every time.

[ryan]

I think that using LazyCron or regular cron (with a PW bootstrapped shell script) is a good way to go for auto-scheduling stuff like this. I'd recommend using an unpublished status for pages that shouldn't appear on the site yet, and then changing them to published once the time is right. Something like this:

<?php
$unpublished = $pages->find("status=unpublished, publish_date<" . time()); // assuming publish_date is your date field's name
foreach($unpublished as $p) {
    $p->removeStatus(Page::statusUnpublished); 
    $p->save(); 
}

[formmailer]

Thanks guys! I think I'll try out Ryan's suggestion and will do the same for the page expiry date.

I'll try to make it as general as possible, so others can use this as well. Would it be useful to create a module for this?

/Jasper