Manage publishing metadata and dates

Publishing date metadata plays a crucial role in content operations by helping teams:

• Plan and schedule content effectively
• Sort and filter content by publication timelines
• Ensure time-sensitive content (such as news articles or promotions) appears when intended
• Improve SEO by signaling content freshness to search engines

Accurate and consistent publishing dates streamline workflows, improve collaboration, and enhance the audience experience. Different publishing scenarios may require different approaches. Most customers use a combination of methods to best fit their workflows.

Approach A: Manually specify publish dates

Create a dedicated date & time element in your content items to store publish date and time values. Content creators then enter the intended publish dates directly in Kontent.ai.

Approach B: Sync publish date to publishing

Use webhooks triggered by publishing events to automatically update date & time elements with the actual publish dates. You can separate the date & time element into a specific content group to prevent manual edits.

Approach C: Use the last modified date

Leverage the system-generated last modified date of a content item as a proxy for the publish date. This reflects the most recent content change, but doesn’t reflect workflow and other metadata changes. This approach works if publishing occurs immediately after making content changes.