Schedule a post and walk away
Any item can now carry a Publish at time and an optional Unpublish at time. A ticker in the server publishes it through the normal path, checks included, so nobody has to be awake at 9:00 on launch day.
Launches happen at awkward times. The scholarship deadline announcement goes live at 9:00 on a Monday, the council agenda must be public 72 hours before the meeting, and the holiday opening hours should disappear the day after the holiday. Until now someone had to be at a keyboard for each of those moments.
Spillway lets an editor set the time once and leave it.
How it works
Anyone who can publish opens the item and chooses Schedule… in the action bar. There are two fields, both in your local time zone:
- Publish at: when the draft (or the item in review) goes live;
- Unpublish at: optional, for a limited-time announcement.
The action bar then shows a badge such as "Publishes 12 Jan 2026, 09:00" with a Cancel link. The content list shows a scheduled badge next to the status, and a Scheduled chip filters to everything with a pending time. The review queue has a Scheduled tab with the same list, soonest first.
The status does not change early
A scheduled item stays a draft, or stays in review, until its time comes. That is deliberate: the post can still be edited, and a late correction to a date or a name does not mean cancelling and rescheduling.
Same path as a manual publish
A ticker in the server runs every 30 seconds and publishes what is due through the normal publish path. Three things follow from that:
- the pre-publish checks run at that moment, so a missing required field or an image without alt text still blocks the publish;
- the audit log records the publish, with the system as the actor;
- cached pages are evicted, so visitors see the new version.
If a check reports an error at publish time, the post is not published. The badge turns red with the message, a notification goes out, and once the content is fixed the next tick publishes it. We preferred a late post to a broken one.
At the Unpublish at time the item moves to Archived and its URL answers 404. If the link was shared widely, add a redirect.
A habit worth keeping
Run Checks when you save the draft, not on launch morning. The Schedule a post guide walks through the whole flow, step by step.