Managing Expired and Future Scheduled Web Content

This article documents how the Web Content Display portlet is designed to display different versions of the same Web Content article. In particular, this article discusses the intended behaviors for expired or those scheduled for future display.

Resolution

Content creators often create web content articles but they do not want to display the article immediately. For example, a department store's marketing team might create ads in May but is to be shown in September. The portal's Web Content has the ability to schedule publications in the future.

1. Navigate to your site → Content → Web Content
2. Create a Web Content Article called Scheduled Article with a display date scheduled in the future. (For testing purposes, add a month.)
   1. Click Add → Basic Web Content
   2. Enter a title: Scheduled article
   3. Enter some content: This is in the future
   4. Click Schedule in the right menu
   5. Select a month from now in the Display Date section
   6. Click the Publish button
3. Navigate to a site page
4. Add a Web Content Display portlet
5. Click the Configuration menu and select Scheduled Article to be displayed. (Users may have to search for the article using its title or article ID.) Nothing will get displayed in the portlet because the article is scheduled to be displayed in the future.
6. Navigate to your site → Content → Web Content. Edit this article's display date to be in the present.
7. This time the article will be displayed in the portlet. This is the intended behavior.

 

What if I change the scheduled display date to the future again?
The Web Content Display portlet still displays the current version.

1. Navigate to your site → Content → Web Content
2. Edit this article's display date to be in the future; change it to 2 days in the future.
3. Edit the content with the following: Rescheduled
4. Click the Publish button
5. Navigate to the portal page where Scheduled Article is displayed.
6. Verify that the article has not been changed.

 

The Rationale

With each change, there is a new version created: version 1.0 (scheduled for one month from now), version 1.1 (scheduled for present), and version 1.2 (scheduled for two days from now.) The Web Content Display portlet displays only version 1.1 because the display date is current. To ensure that the WCD portlet displays the most current version (e.g. version 1.2), all previous versions must be expired.

How to expire a web content:

1. Navigate to your site → Content → Web Content
2. Click Actions → View History for the article
3. This table shows all the different versions of the same article. Select the version(s) to be expired (e.g versions 1.0 and 1.1)
4. Click the Expire button, then click OK in the validation window.
5. Verify that the status for that version(s) becomes Expired. Navigate back to the site page. If version 1.1 was expired, then the WCD portlet will not display the article.

Note: In DXP 7.2 & 7.3, web content scheduled for future display cannot be expired. For the above example, you can delete version 1.0 and expire version 1.1.