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Manage publishing metadata and dates

Jakub Lokaj, Jan Cerman

3 minutes

Content items / Content groups / Workflow

Mastering content dates in Kontent.ai is essential for accurate content scheduling, sorting, and displaying your content. This cheat sheet reviews available approaches to ensure accuracy and ease of use for content creators.

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. 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.

Pros	Cons
Fully customizable to your needs Straightforward to set up without developer involvement Supports sorting and filtering in your web app	Requires clear editorial processes to maintain accuracy Prone to human error or forgotten entries due to manual input

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.

Pros	Cons
Reduces manual effort and risk of errors Can be hidden from content creators in a content group to avoid accidental changes Supports automation	Requires developer setup and ongoing maintenance May need custom scripts and server access Adds complexity for multi-step workflow updates

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.

Pros	Cons
Updates automatically without manual intervention Accessible via Kontent.ai's API Lightweight solution without extra setup	Not reliable for scheduled updates or delayed publishing workflows Publishing must follow content changes closely Requires content creators to be aware of its limitations Unreliable for sorting content by the latest published date