PublishPress Has a New and Faster Editorial Calendar
PublishPress 3.4 is available now, and it has a completely new editorial calendar.
The old calendar had been around for many years and was starting to show its age. The old version used PHP for 80% of the codebase and only relied on Javascript for the drag-and-drop actions. This legacy code meant that the calendar was slow to load, slow to refresh, and difficult for us to update.
The new calendar is built almost entirely with Javascript (React). When you use it, everything will feel much faster and more modern. Any changes to your screen will happen instantly, without a full page reload.
Visually, you may not see too many changes to the calendar at first. We deliberately kept a similar visual design. In the image below the old calendar is on the left and the new calendar on the right. But when you start using the new PublishPress, you'll immediately notice the speed difference.
Although the main screen is familiar, some parts of the calendar do look very different now. This image below shows the old content creation form on the left. The new version is on the right. This new design is cleaner, and you can now add Categories and Tags.
The modals are also better for existing content. This image below shows the content info box on the left, with the new version on the right. This new box is also cleaner and contains more information. You can now see the Post ID, publish date, post status, tags, and number of editorial comments.
Next steps for the PublishPress Calendar
Re-building the calendar will allow us to add many improvements that just weren't possible with the old code:
- We can create different views for the calendar: Day, Week, Month, Year etc.
- The script can be reused in other locations, such as the WordPress dashboard, or the frontend of the site.
- It's possible to add new color schemes and effects.
Please test the calendar and let us know what you think. We'd love to hear suggestions for ways this can be more useful for your sites.
The calendar could have an option to mark articles to which the editors should come back in the future. For example, we describe the first hearing of a high-profile trial. We know the sentence will be in a year. We provide information in the calendar to come back to the topic in 12 months.
Interesting idea, thanks. Do you have a suggestion for how this could work? Would it be like the “Snooze” button in Gmail?
With the event selected, create a ‘reminder’ event so it’s easy to set a follow-up date? Can the calendar send an email or notification on the reminder due date?
Thanks Peter. Yes, this is the kind of feature that is now possible with the new architecture for the calendar.
Awesome, I’m trying this out today Steve!
As discussed, I’d love to be able to add a scheduled revision to the calendar (without un-publishing the published piece!)
Thanks Elle. That will hopefully arrive with Revisions 3, which we’re working on at the moment.
What would be great is to be able to add the metadata fields to the content creation forms in the calendar view, or just have a separate field for submission or first draft deadline/date that is editable from the content creation forms in the calendar view.
Thanks for the idea, Rob. That is the kind of task that will be much easier to tackle now.