New React-based content Scheduler
Adam Balsam
Wed, 05/09/2020 – 13:28

Lightning 3.1.4 (released on 9 May) ships with a completely new content scheduler built in React. Here’s an example of an editor scheduling a piece of content to be published on Friday and archived the following Monday:

We had four main goals when creating this scheduler:

Simplify the UX [Drupal Update #2935198]
Make the scheduler available on content creation forms [Drupal Update #2935105]
Add ability to schedule multiple transition in serial [Drupal Update #2936757]
Give content editors the ability to set the date that content should be published [Drupal Update #2935715]
For the first goal, we had a related team goal of creating something in React. Originally we had thought that might be an internal tool, something that never saw the light of day, or perhaps a configuration form. But when we started digging into the UX challenges of the scheduler, we realized this was a great fit. The result is a responsive, intuitive widget that sits quietly out of the way until you need to interact with it.

The second and third goals were just to fix a couple or regressions that were introduced when we moved away from the Scheduled Updates module as part of the migration to Content Moderation. Both are table stakes functionality for a usable scheduler.

Finally, the fourth goal comes from the reality that, in many workflows, content authors are often the person who knows when content should actually be published. But content authors usually don’t have permission to actually publish content – and, as a result, can’t schedule that transition either. This system allows site builders to create an “Approved for publish” state. Content authors can then schedule a transition from that state to “Published”, but the transition won’t actually happen unless an Editor moves the content into the “Approved for publish” state first. Look for more documentation about how we expect people to use that functionality in the near future.

You can find a sandbox of Lightning Scheduler – along with Lightning’s other features here:https://lightning.acquia.com/lightning (admin/admin)
Or update to Lightning 3.1.4 yourself:

$ composer require acquia/lightning:3.1.4 –no-update
$ composer update acquia/lightning –with-all-dependencies

Thanks to everyone who helped with testing and UI enhancements. Please file issues in Lightning Workflow’s issue queue.

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