Container Publishing Status Options

A very useful set of options can be found in the Container Element, on the General tab, just under the Visibility options. It’s the Container Publishing Status Options.

By default, all containers are Published, which is one of the choices in the option. So there’s not much to say about that. It’s the other three that offer some great features, particularly for those with seasonal or temporary content.

The second option is Published Until. If you select this, a date and time picker appears, and here you can select the specific time that the Container is published until. After that time, it reverts to draft status, and is then only visible to logged in users with the capability to publish posts.

This feature is particularly useful to website owners with seasonal or temporary content, as in this way, they can automate the publication of the container, and not have to manually come in to sort it on a particular date.

The next option is Publish After. This is the same in the sense that if you select this, you choose a date and time, after which the container’s status becomes published.

So you can design and set up your container to be published on a particular day and time.

Any time after it’s published, you could edit it again, and this time select Published Until, and set the date for it to be unpublished. Once it reaches that date, the container reverts back to Draft status, and is not visible to the public.

Draft status is also useful if you are updating a live site with a new container, but you don’t get finished. You can just set it to draft, and save your work, and then you can come back another time to complete and publish the container.

OK, these often overlooked options can be very useful for controlling content on a container by container basis.

When using the publishing status options on containers, they are not hidden as they would be with the visibility options. Instead they are treated like conditional rendering is applied. If the container is in draft mode or scheduled for a later date, it won’t render at all, and thus there is no indexing, and also no additional weight on page load.