As part of my work on Teams, and the new ability to set someone as the “author” of a post, I’m also considering adding a long-requested feature to the web editor: scheduling posts. This has been requested before, both here (Scheduled Posts?) and in private messages.
But for all the people who want this feature, I know many people also don’t need this feature. So for the sake of balance and staying minimal for those who want it, I’m wondering: What’s the case against supporting scheduled posts? Do you think it’d slow down the publishing flow too much? Do you think it’d lead to too much clutter? Too much distraction?
Design
For a little reference, this would change how the Publish button in the editor works. Instead of clicking Publish and the post instantly publishing to your blog, it would open a small window like this – then clicking Publish here would actually publish the post.
Thoughts?
Please feel free to share any thoughts you have. Strong opinions are good! I’ll use all of this to design a flow that hopefully balances everyone’s needs, whether you need this feature or not.
Actually, now that I see how it looks like, I would say, add the “blog” it is being published to as well. I see this as one final check before publishing. I wouldn’t mind having this option honestly.
I wouldn’t use the feature, simply because I don’t want all posts to go to all subscribers. So, sometimes I publish to Anonymous first, wait 20min, then move to the main blog. Also, I would find myself checking to see if it was actually published, so it would result in extra time rather than less.
I would really appreciate the ability to schedule posts both from the web UI and from the iOS app. The flow to have to schedule to Anonymous and then go in and edit the publish in the future and blog selection is cumbersome for such a basic feature. I think that you’re UI above makes sense to not add friction to the non-scheduler flow.
I would highly appreciate the ability to schedule posts. I’m writing articles for magazines and I’m publishing these articles in my blog. But I have to wait until the printed magazine with my article is available before I am allowed to post the article on my blog. Scheduling a post is much easier than adding a reminder in my calendar and copy/paste the article when I’m allowed to.
Just making sure you’re aware of the steps that Matt shares in the original post that’s linked… scheduling posts is “possible”, but it’s a bit of a process (but may be better than using calendar reminders). Here’s the steps summarized:
Publish a post
Press “Edit”
Click the small “i” icon near the top-right corner of the editor
Change the “Created” date to the future date when you want the post published
If you want to avoid having your post show up on your blog at all, you can instead publish the post as “Anonymous” (Draft on WriteFreely), follow these steps, and then move your post to your blog.
Thanks. Yes, I am. But that procedure is too complicated. In my case, publishing the article before the printed magazine is delivered is a violation of a contract. I don’t want to take that risk by “publishing” anonymously and modifying the created date. An easy way just to set the publishing date and time would solve my problem very elegantly.
