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.
Why is this important?
Publish date information is critical for workflows like content planning, sorting content by publication timelines, and ensuring that time-sensitive content (like news articles or promotional posts) appears as intended. Missing or inaccurate publish dates can lead to inefficiencies and errors, disrupting the user experience.Handling content modification and publishing dates within a CMS can significantly impact content management, usability, and SEO.
Available solutions with Kontent.ai
Review the following approaches to see which works best for your situation. Most customers use a combination of them as different publishing use cases may prefer different approaches.
Approach A: Manually specify publish dates
Create a new date & time element to store publish date and time values in your content items. Content creators manually input the intended publish date.
Pros
Cons
Fully customizable
Straightforward to set up
Supports sorting and filtering in your web app
Relies on manual input by content creators
Risk of mismatched or forgotten entries
Need more publishing metadata?You can add multiple date & time elements to add metadata such as:
First creation date: Track when the content was first created.
First publish date: Mark the initial publishing date.
Last publish date: Record the most recent publish event.
Approach B: Sync publish date to publishing
Use webhook notifications to automatically update the date & time elements with the publish dates after content items are published. You can separate the date & time element in a specific content group to restrict manual edits.
Pros
Cons
Reduces manual effort and human error
Can be hidden from content creators in a content group
Supports automation
Requires technical setup and maintenance.
May need custom scripts and server access.
Adds complexity for multi-step workflow updates
Approach C: Use the last modified date
Use the content item’s last modified date as a proxy for the publish date. The system-generated last modified date reflects the most recent content change. It doesn’t reflect workflow changes and other metadata changes.This approach works if publishing occurs immediately after making content changes.
Need more publishing metadata?You can add multiple date & time elements to add metadata such as: