New site feature: post scheduling 📅

Let me introducing y'all to the latest feature to be added to Forem: post scheduling. (Read @ben's announcement post over on dev.to here).

That's right - you can now write your posts and set them up to be published at a future date! Super helpful if you've got a lot of content that you want to drip feed into the community from your other blog, or you're an organization wanting to set up a content calendar. (I'm being deliberately unimaginative here, so please feel free to take the lead and show me what wild and wonderful uses you can apply this feature to.)

It works a little differently depending on whether you're using the Rich + markdown editor or the Basic markdown editor (check in your User Settings > Customization under Writing), so I'll show you both one-by-one.

Rich + markdown editor

Those of you who have used the Rich + markdown editor before will be familiar with the toolbar at the bottom of the page that allows you to publish your post amongst other actions:

The magic button here is the ⚙ button (or "hexagon button") that expands to provide additional post options such as Canonical URL or adding your post to a Series, and now, Schedule Publication:

Clicking on the date field will display a date picker:

And when you've selected your date from the date picker you'll be able to add a time to it. You can also add a time independently of the date, which will default to today's date.

A note on time selection: as Ben clarifies in the comments on his DEV post, the time you're selecting defaults to your machine timezone and there's currently no additional option for choosing an alternate timezone in the post scheduler.

Clear the date and/or time by clicking on the small ❌ buttons on the right-hand-side of the date/time fields.

Basic markdown editor

Those of you using the Basic markdown editor will know that all the buttons and bells and whistles above are redundant. Your front matter now has an additional variable field that is hashed out until you enable it:

Please note that your timezone is specified in this editor version, so if you don't change it from +0000 you'll end up with a post published at the specified time UTC.

If you don't enable it, the publication date and time will be now. You do still need to set the post to published: true yourself. That part hasn't changed.

Wrapping up

If you have any questions about this feature, please head over to Ben's post on DEV to join the conversation. If you think you've found a bug, the best place to report that is Forem's repo.

Hope this info helps, and happy posting!