I was recently playing around with the Windows Live Writer application and tried all kinds of different scenarios that a client might bump into. One of these scenarios was that a user could accidently publish a post that should only be published... let's say, the next day.
Now you think this is easy, just change the publication date and the post will disappear. Well that’s what I thought, but it did not work. It does actually not work with any document, no matter if you use Live Writer or the cmsdesk.
Not a bug…
But what seems like a bug is actually proper behaviour. What happens after a document is already published? Kentico support explains it this way:
”At this point you decide to change the “Publish from” to some future date, you save the document, it goes to edit step and you publish the document. If you now switch to live site mode you will see the PREVIOUS published version of the document, since the previous version of the document is still published and from the date in “Publish from” field will be the new one visible on the live site.”
Or in other words we have a conflict of interest here. Just imaging you have a page that you frequently update, let’s say a “special offer” page. This page is updated every Monday, but you prepare the page in advance Fridays. With the “publish from” field you schedule when the update has to go live. Until the next Monday the previous version will be visible to your visitors.
The solution to our case
But how can I hide an already published page and postpone the publication date? The solution is quite simple:
- Archive your already published document;
- Enter the new “publish from” date;
- Save and publish again;
You will notice that your page has now disappeared from the live site and will only show up at the defined publication date.
Now this of course can not be done with Live Writer. If ever you run into this problem, just log into the cmsdesk.