The Metadata Plugin Metadata Management for Manila

Site last updated 2/24/2006; 12:33:21 PM

Home Why Features FAQ Updates Documentation Download Developers Bugs Feedback Discuss Planned Features				Scheduled Publishing Scheduled publishing is for when you want to add a new story to your Manila site, but you don't want to add it right now. You can schedule your Manila story for any time in the future, down to the hour. Here's how. First, you'll need to enable scheduled publishing for your site. You do this by going to the main interface for the metadata plugin (click on metaData in your editors-only bar). Then click on Scheduled Publishing to bring up the Scheduled Publishing interface. First, make sure you've run the metaDataSuite.install script in your metadata.root. Enable scheduled publishing for your site by clicking the radio button, as shown in this screenshot: Click the Update button to register your change, and you're ready to go. Now when you create a new story, you'll see a new metadata field at the bottom of your screen: The field allows you to specify the hour when you want the story published. It defaults to the current hour, so if you want the story published immediately, just ignore the Scheduled Publishing field. You may wish to change the order that the month, day, year and hour appear. You can do this from the same screen you used to enable scheduled publishing. Simply rearrange the order of the strings. Scheduled Editing When you edit a story or message, you have the option of delaying the effect of that edit until a future time by adjusting the Scheduled Publishing options. If a message is being edited by someone at the time that the scheduled edit takes effect, the scheduled edit will fail. Technical information: The field labels and the contents of the month dropdown field are localized, so if you want to translate them into Italian you can do it easily by modifying the localization table at metaDataData. Scheduled publishing works by detecting, in the metadata plugin's firstFilter, that a new story is being posted or a story or message edited. If the user desires immediate publication, the scheduled publishing code steps aside and everything proceeds as normal. However, if the user has assigned a scheduled publishing time, the firstFilter diverts processing to metaDataSuite.scheduledPublishing.act_queue, which extracts the information about the story and its metadata and prepares a special table at config.manila.metadata.pubQueue.[timecode], where timecode is a simple string denoting a specific hour. Then it returns a success message to the user, preventing Manila from creating the story. Why didn't we simply use Manila's callbacks for this? Because the callbacks don't get called until after the page has been added to the message table, which is too late. Each hour, a task runs that checks the pubQueue for pending stories and processes the table, creating new stories and assigning metadata to them as necessary. Information about the publishing activities is written to the standard Frontier log for that day. Comments...