payload-plugin-scheduler

Payload plugin that enables scheduled publishing for draft-enabled collections, inspired by wordpress post scheduler.

Installation

npm i payload-plugin-scheduler

Usage

// payload.config.ts

import { buildConfig } from 'payload/config'
import { ScheduledPostPlugin } from 'payload-plugin-scheduler'
import Pages from './collections/Pages'
import Posts from './collections/Posts'

export default buildConfig({
  collections: [Pages, Posts],
  plugins: [
    ScheduledPostPlugin({
      collections: ['pages', 'posts'],
      interval: 10,
    })
  ]
  // ...more config
})

Options

collections: string[]

An array of collection slugs. All collections must have drafts enabled.

interval?: number

Specify how frequently to check for scheduled posts (in minutes). This value will also be passed to the DatePicker component. Defaults to 5 mins.

scheduledPosts?: Partial<CollectionConfig>

Custom configuration for the scheduled posts collection that gets merged with the defaults.

Approach

In a nutshell, the plugin creates a publish_date field that it uses to determine whether a pending draft update needs to be scheduled.

publish_date

Custom Datetime field added to documents in enabled collections. Includes custom Field and Cell components that include schedule status in the client-side UI.

scheduled_posts

Collection added by the plugin to store pending schedule updates. Can be customized via scheduledPosts option.

Cron

A configurable timer checks for any posts to be scheduled in the upcoming interval window. For each hit, it creates a separate job that's fired at that document's publish_date (via node-schedule). The idea here is that you can configure your interval window to avoid super long running tasks that are more prone to flaking.

Notes

Since the plugin uses cron under the hood, it depends on a long-running server and is incompatible with short-lived/serverless environments like ECS, or Vercel if you're using Payload 3.0 beta.

I developed this plugin for a project that hasn't gone live yet. It has good test coverage but not in the wild yet -- there's your disclaimer.