Schedule Drafts to publish

[MattWilcox]

Brought up by James in the Discord https://discord.com/channels/456442477667418113/456442477667418115/999963733558296666 but does make a lot of sense.

We can schedule a publish date for any Entry, but we can't schedule publication of a Draft? At least not that I'm aware of, and not with cache busting? So while we can have new pages automatically appear on a given date/time, we can't have scheduled changes to existing pages. Seems like a logical thing some clients would want to do.

[MattWilcox]

By way of example of how we currently ensure caches on templates are busted when a new entry is scheduled:

{# How long can the cache last? When's the next pending publication? #}
{% set firstPending = craft.entries
    .section('newsItems')
    .status('pending')
    .orderBy('postDate asc')
    .one()
%}
{% if firstPending | length %}
    {% set cacheUntil = firstPending.postDate %}
{% endif %}

{% if cacheUntil is defined %}
    {% cache until cacheUntil %}
        {% include '_news-listing' %}
    {% endcache %}
{% else %}
    {% cache %}{# standard caching is fine now #}
        {% include '_news-listing' %}
    {% endcache %}
{% endif %}

As far as I can tell, there's not a way we'd be able to do this for changes to an existing Entry.

[brandonkelly]

Unlike entry Post/Expiry Dates, which can be referenced in entry queries to ensure only live entries are returned, there are several actual database changes that need to happen when a draft is published.

So to solve this we first need to implement a scheduling library such as https://github.com/omnilight/yii2-scheduling (#8847), and require that all Craft sites (or those that want this feature) set a cron job that runs the schedule every minute. Then we can create a scheduled job that checks for any drafts that are due to be published, and handles that.

We’ll probably add support for entry publish events (#10858, #9170, #9394) and batched content releases (#8941) alongside it.

[LucasPoignonnec]

Hi @brandonkelly
This feature has been requested by 1 of our clients. I see a mention on this page https://craftcms.com/blog/laravel that this is planned to be developed as part of Craft 6.
Can you please confirm if that (still) is the case?
Thank you.