It should work (unless there's a bug but I haven't heard of it).
The only important thing to realise is that IIS will automatically shut down a site that hasn't gotten any visits in at least 20 minutes. That's the default setting at least and few hosts change it. What this means is that if your site doesn't have any activity (say in the middle of the night) and you set your 'publish at' to be at 2am the site might not actually be running then and so the event won't fire.
To test the publish at, unpublish a page and then set the publish at to be in two minutes time. Hit the save button. Then refresh the site in 2-3 minutes and see if the page has shown up. Publishing isn't accurate to the second but certainly within the minute. So give your page that extra minute before saying it didn't work.
If your test works then it is almost certainly a matter of IIS automatically stopping the application pool due to inactivity. If that's the case you might use an automated uptime tool such as pingdom to tickle the site every 10 minutes on some obscure page (so you can filter it out of your statistics) and keep the site alive even through the night.
One other thing to keep in mind is the timezone of the host server, which might not be the same as the clock on your computer and could be off by an hour or many hours. That can create what appears to be a problem with publishing at a specified time when in reality the time either hasn't yet happened or has already gone by from the perspective of the host server.
Not that that's the source of this bug but I wanted to mention it since you said your site was hosted. Something to remember when you upgrade and the publish at works properly again.
I don't know what version it might have been corrected in. But don't fear about XSLT... it remains in Umbraco is works great! XSLT isn't going anywhere any time soon that's for sure.
I have the same problem with 6.0.5. I set the publishing time to a time 2 minutes in advance. The site is active. But the page remains unpublished after the publishing time has passed. My customer is not amused.
Does anybody have an idea, what I can do about it?
It works for me on my local machine with 6.0.6. Any chance your site's server has a different time or timezone?
When you set the publish at time, be sure to 'save' the content page (the first icon on the toolbar), otherwise the setting will not take effect. The content tree won't automatically refresh to show the page is published unless you refresh the browser or reload the nodes in the content tree. Whether the content tree is updated or not to reflect the publication status, the page should appear on the live website for visitors.
The scheduled publish time is not necessarily accurate to the second, but certainly within the minute specified.
I faced this issue and it was because of Event Handlers that I had that were throwing exceptions when my event was raised by scheduled publishing. When an event is fired with scheduled publishing there is no user associated with the action (User.GetCurrent() returns null), and this was my issue - my event handler expected that there would always be user.
Has anyone managed to find a working solution for this issue?
I am running v6.1.5 when i set the publish at time and press save (just save) when it gets to that time umbraco just clears the field and doesnt publish the page. I have also tried to publish the page first, unpublish and then set the publish time which also doesnt work. I am not recieveing any errors and all validation checks have been past on the page type. Does anyone have any other ideas?
'Publish at' not working in Umbraco V 4.7.0
Hi Guys,
I saved a date in 'publish at' text box and hit save, but the content still remains unpublished.
Is this a bug in V4.7.0 or do we have a workaround for this?
Regards,
Ambika
It should work (unless there's a bug but I haven't heard of it).
The only important thing to realise is that IIS will automatically shut down a site that hasn't gotten any visits in at least 20 minutes. That's the default setting at least and few hosts change it. What this means is that if your site doesn't have any activity (say in the middle of the night) and you set your 'publish at' to be at 2am the site might not actually be running then and so the event won't fire.
To test the publish at, unpublish a page and then set the publish at to be in two minutes time. Hit the save button. Then refresh the site in 2-3 minutes and see if the page has shown up. Publishing isn't accurate to the second but certainly within the minute. So give your page that extra minute before saying it didn't work.
If your test works then it is almost certainly a matter of IIS automatically stopping the application pool due to inactivity. If that's the case you might use an automated uptime tool such as pingdom to tickle the site every 10 minutes on some obscure page (so you can filter it out of your statistics) and keep the site alive even through the night.
Hope this helps.
cheers,
doug.
Doug,
I tried unpublishing a page and then set the publish at Date and hit 'Save'.But still this doesn't work. :(
Interesting. Perhaps there really is a bug there. I'll see if I have a v4.7.0 install I can run a quick test on and let you know what I find out.
Quite right, scheduled publishing via the 'Publish at' property is broken in v4.7!
I know it workes in more recent versions though so it's already been fixed.
cheers,
doug.
One other thing to keep in mind is the timezone of the host server, which might not be the same as the clock on your computer and could be off by an hour or many hours. That can create what appears to be a problem with publishing at a specified time when in reality the time either hasn't yet happened or has already gone by from the perspective of the host server.
Not that that's the source of this bug but I wanted to mention it since you said your site was hosted. Something to remember when you upgrade and the publish at works properly again.
cheers,
doug.
Doug,
Thanks for the updated. So upgrading to V4.7.1 or 4.7.2 would solve the issue.
I dont think it would be possible for me to upgrade to more recent versions as they dont have XSLT in them.
Regards,
Ambika
Hi, Ambika,
I don't know what version it might have been corrected in. But don't fear about XSLT... it remains in Umbraco is works great! XSLT isn't going anywhere any time soon that's for sure.
cheers,
doug.
We are on version 4.11.4 and 'publish at' doesn't work. The server time is correct and a normal publish works.
Can anyone confirm which version this was fixed in? Or whether there are any known workarounds.
I have the same problem with 6.0.5. I set the publishing time to a time 2 minutes in advance. The site is active. But the page remains unpublished after the publishing time has passed. My customer is not amused.
Does anybody have an idea, what I can do about it?
It works for me on my local machine with 6.0.6. Any chance your site's server has a different time or timezone?
When you set the publish at time, be sure to 'save' the content page (the first icon on the toolbar), otherwise the setting will not take effect. The content tree won't automatically refresh to show the page is published unless you refresh the browser or reload the nodes in the content tree. Whether the content tree is updated or not to reflect the publication status, the page should appear on the live website for visitors.
The scheduled publish time is not necessarily accurate to the second, but certainly within the minute specified.
cheers,
doug.
I faced this issue and it was because of Event Handlers that I had that were throwing exceptions when my event was raised by scheduled publishing. When an event is fired with scheduled publishing there is no user associated with the action (User.GetCurrent() returns null), and this was my issue - my event handler expected that there would always be user.
Hope this is of some help!
Has anyone managed to find a working solution for this issue?
I am running v6.1.5 when i set the publish at time and press save (just save) when it gets to that time umbraco just clears the field and doesnt publish the page. I have also tried to publish the page first, unpublish and then set the publish time which also doesnt work. I am not recieveing any errors and all validation checks have been past on the page type. Does anyone have any other ideas?
Thanks in advance.
@James - this seems to be working for us in 6.1.6. Might be worth updating?
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