In the last two days I wrote about two new feature of Subtext 2.0: Enclosures and performance optimizations for skins.

Today I’ll talk about another new feature of Subtext 2.0: Future Posting.

I already anticipated this feature while I was testing it last week: posting in the future allows the blog’s author to write a post either with the post editor online or with any offline blogging application (like Windows Live Writer), set the date and time, save it on the server as published (not as draft), and have it automatically published both on the blog and the RSS feed at the specified moment.

This is useful when writing series of posts: you write all your posts at once, and then schedule them to appear online one per week or per day or every couple of days. (Which is what I’ve been doing with this series of posts.)

It’s also useful when you go on holiday but you still want to publish something on your blog: you can write some posts before your leave and set the publish date in the future while you are relaxing on some Maldivian beach.

How to set the publishing date of post?

If you are using the online post editor, you have to set the Post Date (in en-US format mm/dd/yyyy hh:mm:ss AM/PM) in the Advanced Options panel. The time must be in the blog’s time zone. Expect some enhancements in a future release of Subtext, like an Ajax datetime picker, or similar UI elements.

If you are using Windows Live Writer, you can set the date of the post with the date picker on the bottom toolbar.

How do I know that a post will be published in the future?

A post published in the future will not be accessible online till the publish date has been reached, but you can see the scheduled posts looking at the list of posts in the admin. If the post is scheduled for future publishing, the list will tell you when this will happen.

How dates relate to URLs

Subtext stores 3 different dates for each post:

• the date in which the post created
• the last modify date
• and the publish date

Till Subtext 2.0 the permalink of the post was generated using the date of creation, but now that it’s possible to post in the future this will not make sense anymore: if you write 10 posts and schedule for future publishing they will appear as created all at the same day.

So now the permalink will be generated using the publish date, so that also the url shows the real publish date.

But to keep the backward compatibility, and don’t change the url of past posts, the upgrade procedure to Subtext 2.0 includes also a little update scripts that copies the date of creation into the publish date.

Feedback? Questions?

As usual, if you have questions, bug reports and feedback just write on the forums and report bugs.

It’s done with the features I implemented in Subtext 2.0: tomorrow I’ll write about how the frontend performance optimization works behind the scenes. Please subscribe to the feed if you want to get it automatically in your feedreader.