Distributor: Allow scheduled content to have distributions pre-set

[jeffpaul]

Is your enhancement related to a problem? Please describe.
There are some scenarios where a publishing workflow culminates in scheduling a post to publish once it's been fully reviewed/edited/etc., is "ready to go", and would be best published one a specific date/time versus the current date/time. In these scenarios, a Distributor user must come back into the WP install after the content has published to select where it should distribute to.

Describe the solution you'd like

• [ ] once a post/page/CPT has been scheduled to publish, display the Distributor admin bar menu to select the sites to which the content should distribute to upon being published

Designs

n/a, but can be generated if desired

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

I've considered also allowing scheduled posts to be displayed in the Pull Content menu, but that screen feels more like a reactive pull-content-after-the-fact that worrying about showing Scheduled content there doesn't seem to jive with. I'm open to alternate opinions, but this is my current feeling for not suggesting we include Scheduled content in the Pull Content menu.

[joshuaabenazer]

@jeffpaul if a scheduled post needs to be distributed to the other site once the post does get published, would it be right to assume that there wouldn't need to be an option to distribute the post as a draft?
The reasoning behind this would be, if it would need to be published as a draft, might as well distribute it after the post is published. So in that context should the draft option be removed for scheduled posts?

[joshuaabenazer]

Also I think it may make more sense to directly distribute the post and schedule it on the site it needs to be distributed on rather than distributing it once the post is published.
Again it could depend, and may vary for different use cases, but I feel it makes sense to treat a scheduled post as ready to be published. Any subsequent changes to the scheduled post would anyway translate over to the distributed scheduled post.
This would also provide for people on the distributed site, to make changes if need be and unlink from original before hand.
Thoughts?

[jeffpaul]

@joshuaabenazer all good questions, though I could see a scenario where someone may want to schedule a post and only have it distribute once its been published to account for sensitive / embargo-worthy content versus pre-distributing the content and potentially having someone on the remote site leak info before content is published. So while I agree there could be some duplication between the draft and scheduled functionality I can also see where unique use cases exist for each. For now let's hold off on further work here until we get v1.6 released and can get more informed input from the rest of the team on preferred approach. Thanks for the critical thinking @joshuaabenazer!

[jeffpaul]

@joshuaabenazer after doing some more testing / research on this, I realized that distributing as draft isn't a scenario where the origin post has post status of draft but rather published and its the remote post that has its status as draft. So its not a scenario where the scheduled Distributor functionality overlaps with the draft Distributor functionality.

[jeffpaul]

I'm attached a PDF document that outlines potential UX for this functionality to allow for selection of sites to distribute to after a post has been scheduled. PRs welcome!

Distributor Scheduling UX.pdf

[ldollard]

I do think for most people that would want to use distributor, they are doing so because they do not want to interact with the remote sites at all except for maintenance/updates. So having distributor act as the scheduling distributor on the master site would be great, so it was a central hub for the posts scheduling options amongst other things.

[ldollard]

I'm attached a PDF document that outlines potential UX for this functionality to allow for selection of sites to distribute to after a post has been scheduled. PRs welcome!

Distributor Scheduling UX.pdf

If ok, i think an additional solution would be to schedule the posts as you normally would in WP post section.

Then when you click on the distributor dropdown it would first check to see the posts status:

• Scheduled > Pulls in the scheduled date and attributes this status to the post in distributor
• Draft > attributes this status to the post in distributor
• Published > attributes this status to the post in distributor
• Pending Review > attributes this status to the post in distributorsites

Then here you could have a Button with Text beside it that says:

Status = Scheduled (Button thats say "Change")

Allowing you to change the status if need for this single push.

The reason i believe this would be beneficial would be if you wanted to schedule a post to remote site B for two days later, but wanted to post immediataly to remote site A and i think the above steps would make that as quick as possible

[jeffpaul]

@ldollard thanks for the input, it's super helpful to understand how Distributor users like you would want to see something like this work!

[ldollard]

You are welcome, i'm never sure when I'm overstepping the Mark. but I've done and do a lot of work and program processes for my devs and designers for clients projects, so I hoped it would be useful. Honestly, I have a long list of distributor ideas if you really want them lol... Purely because I've tried every other distribution/broadcast cms/plugin solution for Wordpress and I feel distributor has the chance to become something pretty massive in the WordPress community far beyond what you guys have it doing now. As all the others always have one distinct flaw that make them overall not useful.

[jeffpaul]

@ldollard feel free to either open those Distributor ideas as new GitHub issues or send to me in one email and I can separate them out (or link you to any existing GitHub issues on the topic)... thanks!