Publishing

Yes, it’s yet another post on something that Renaissance does, well, a little bit differently. So, ladies and gentlemen, our topic for today is time-based content publishing.

It’s maybe not the most hugely important, thrilling feature of a CMS, but it rose to the top of my mind, as, well, I’m using WordPress to write this, and it’s got that little time-based publishing feature over to the right there, just waiting to be commented upon.

As I’m sure most of you are aware, WordPress lets you save something as a draft before actually publishing it. Publishing happens either when you hit the big, fat ‘Publish’ button, or at a specified time in the future.

Renaissance has a similar system. Every piece of content has a flag attached to it, saying whether it’s live on the site or not. You can flip that toggle on and off as much as you like. If it’s set to ‘off’, that piece of content can never appear on the front end of your web site. What the publishing system does, is, very simply, toggle it on or off at a set point in the future.

It’s that “or off” that’s the important part of that statement. As you’re maybe gathering by this point in the blog, Renaissance’s chief overriding concern is flexibility. It’s built to be flexible above all other concerns.

Flexibility

So, Renaissance doesn’t just allow you to set a publishing date for content. It allows you to un-publish it too. Even better, it doesn’t limit you do doing it just once. You can apply as many publishing or un-publishing dates to a piece of content as you like. The one thing it doesn’t do yet is allow you to set up periodic events (e.g. publishing a piece of content at noon every Monday, and hiding it an hour later). I’m really keen to add that soon.

Now, all that might seem to go against the principles of the ‘permanent web’, or whatever it’s meant to be called. You know, every piece of content having a unique id, being persistent, always located in the same place, always being accessible, etcetera. I understand the import of that paradigm… but, at the same time, it’s just kind of… boring.

Just off  the top of my head I can think of examples where you might want to use Renaissance’s system, as opposed to a publish once and leave it forever system. Maybe you want a special offer that’s only visible during your peak traffic period (hum, automatic publishing based on traffic quantities, now there’s a thought…). Maybe you have content that’s only relevent during a specific event. Maybe you’re creating an art project that’s deliberately unpredictable.

The point is…

Renaissance is built to allow people to do things with it that I, as it’s designer, could never have predicted you’d want to do. And more often than not, before long a client or a project demands something that’s just that—something I never would have predicted.

What do you think? Sound useful? And are there many other applications than support this level of flexibility with time-based publishing?

(Side note: having said all that, the publishing system is actually broken at the moment, as it’s not kept up with changes in the framework. Got to do something about that).

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Tagged as: features, flexibility, publishing