Scheduling vs. Publishing
What you'll learn
- What the scheduled date and published date actually do in m18t today.
- Why setting a date does not publish anything on its own.
- How publishing actually happens: a manual click, per destination.
The concept: a date is a plan, not a trigger
Here's the honest version, because m18t is in beta and this is exactly the kind of thing that bites people who assume otherwise: m18t does not auto-publish. There is no background job watching for a due date and shipping content when it arrives. Every publish — to your CMS, to Facebook or Instagram — is a button you press.
So what are the date fields for? They're for planning. A piece of content has two timestamps:
- Scheduled At — when you intend to publish it. It places the piece on the calendar so you can see your pipeline and balance the load across days.
- Published At — when it actually went live. You can set it yourself, and it's what the calendar uses to plot already-published work.
Setting Scheduled At to next Tuesday tells you (and the calendar) "this is meant to go out Tuesday." When Tuesday comes, nothing happens automatically. You open the piece and publish it. The trade in beta: you get a clear, honest pipeline view, and you keep your hand on the trigger.
Roadmap note. A scheduled-auto-publish loop (status + due date → publish without a click) is on the roadmap. It is not wired today. Don't rely on it existing yet.
How to set a schedule
- Open the content piece.
- On the General tab, in the Classification section, set Scheduled At (and Published At if you're recording when it went live).
- Save.
The piece now shows on the calendar on its scheduled date, where you can drag it to a different day to reschedule.
How to publish
When you're ready to actually ship:
- Open the piece and go to the Publishing tab (it appears after the first save).
- Pick your destination and publish it manually:
- For your CMS, use Push to CMS / Update in CMS — see Pushing to Your CMS.
- For social, use the per-channel Publish buttons — see Publishing to Facebook & Instagram.
Each destination is published independently, and each reports its own result on that row.
Common variations
Recording a past publish date. If something went live elsewhere and you're backfilling, set Published At to the real date so the calendar reflects history. Setting the date doesn't re-push anything.
Status and dates are separate. A piece's status (e.g. Testing, Production) is its own field. m18t doesn't enforce that a date and a status agree, and setting either one does not publish. Publishing is always the explicit action on the Publishing tab.
FAQ
Will m18t publish my content automatically when the scheduled time arrives? No. There is no auto-publish today. Scheduled At is a planning date; publishing is a manual click. Auto-publish is roadmap.
What's the difference between Scheduled At and Published At? Scheduled At is your intended publish time (used for planning and the calendar). Published At records when it actually went live. Neither one triggers a publish.
If I set the status to a "live" status, does it go live? No. Status is a label and an ordering, not a publish trigger. See The Status Set. You still publish manually.
Why doesn't my piece show on the calendar? The calendar plots items by their date fields. A piece with no Scheduled At or Published At won't appear under those date sources. See The Calendar View.
Can I publish to two destinations at once? You trigger each destination from the Publishing tab. CMS push and social publish are separate actions; there's also a "Publish all pending" action for social channels you've selected.