PublishPress Future Now Supports Other Plugins and Imports
The PublishPress Future plugin lets you set up automatic changes to your posts. You can pick a day for PublishPress Future to do things like delete a post, switch its status, or update what categories it's in. These changes are called Future Actions.
The latest version of PublishPress Future Pro has a cool, new feature called “Metadata Scheduling.” This gives you even more ways to control Future Actions.
This “Metadata Scheduling” feature is geared towards more technical users, so I'll try to explain carefully why we built this and what it does.
What Does the Metadata Scheduling Feature Do?
In short, Metadata Scheduling makes it easier to use external sources of data to control Future Actions.
WordPress often stores key data for posts in “metadata” fields. You can now use these fields to manage your site's Future Actions.
Here are three examples of what's possible with Metadata Scheduling:
- Plugin integrations: You can use a plugin such as Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) to control Future Actions. This is useful for people whose sites rely heavily on plugins such as ACF.
- Code integrations: It is now possible to write your own integrations with PublishPress Future. If your custom code can add a date to a post metadata field, you can use this to control PublishPress Future.
- Imports: You can add the data for each Action to a CSV file and import that using a plugin such as WP All Import.
Video Introduction to Metadata Scheduling
An Example With Advanced Custom Fields
This example will show you how to update the Future Action Date from an ACF field. This post has an overview of what data you can control using ACF or another plugin.
The first step is to create a field in the ACF plugin. Here are the fields we'll use for this example:
- Field Type: choose the “Date Time Picker” option.
- Display Format: choose the “Y-m-d H:i:s” option.
- Go to “Future”, then “Settings” in your WordPress admin menu.
- Click the “Post Types” tab.
- In the “Posts” area, check the box “Enable metadata integration for the post type”.
- In the “Action Data” area, enter the “Field Name” that you created in the step above.
You can now use the ACF field to update the date for Future Actions.
- Edit a post.
- Enable the Future Action option in the sidebar.
- Enter a date in the ACF field.
- Save the post and refresh the field.
- The Future Action will be updated with the date from the ACF field.
More About Metadata Scheduling
If you want to integrate PublishPress Future Pro with other plugins, you can use this guide to get started. We also have a longer example of using this feature with Advanced Custom Fields. If you are curious about the geeky side of how this works, we have a technical breakdown of Metadata Scheduling.
