Drafts & Scheduled Posts

Not every post is ready to publish the moment you start writing it. Drafts let you save work-in-progress posts and come back to them later. Scheduled posts let you write now and publish at a specific date and time automatically.

What You Will Learn

• How to save a post as a draft
• Where to find and manage your drafts
• How to schedule a post for future publication
• How the draft/schedule split-button UI works
• How scheduled posts are published and what happens if the window is missed

Saving a Draft

When you are composing a new topic and want to save your progress without publishing:

1. Write your title and content as usual.
2. Click the arrow next to the main Post button to expand the split-button menu.
3. Select Save as Draft.

Your draft is saved immediately and you are returned to the space listing. No notification is sent to other members. The topic does not appear in the space listing.

Tip: Press Ctrl+Enter (Windows/Linux) or Cmd+Enter (Mac) to trigger the composer’s primary action without reaching for the mouse. This clicks the split-button’s current primary button - for a new post that submits it; while editing a draft it runs whichever action the button currently shows.

Finding Your Drafts

Two ways to get there, both show the same list:

• The Drafts tab on your profile at /community/u/your-username/
• A dedicated standalone page at /community/drafts/ (new in 1.4.1)

Your drafts are listed in order of last-modified time, most recent first. The standalone page requires sign-in and is excluded from search engines, so unfinished work never leaks. Each draft shows:

• The post title (or “Untitled Draft” if you have not written a title yet)
• The space it is intended for
• When you last saved it

Click any draft to reopen the full composer with your saved content. Make your changes, then publish or save again.

Drafts are private. Only you and site admins can see your drafts.

Drafts and Post Counts

Draft posts do not count toward any community statistics until they are published:

• They do not increment the space’s post count.
• They do not appear in the space listing.
• They do not appear in search results.
• They do not appear on your public profile’s Posts tab.

The moment a draft is published, either manually or via scheduled publishing, all of the above update immediately.

Scheduling a Post

You can schedule a post to publish automatically at a specific future date and time:

1. Write your title and content.
2. Click the arrow next to the Post button to expand the split-button menu.
3. Select Schedule.
4. A date and time picker appears. Choose the date, hour and minute you want the post to go live. Times are in the site’s timezone (Settings > General), not your device’s.
5. Click Schedule.

You are taken to the scheduled post, which shows when it will publish. It does not appear publicly until then.

A schedule needs both a date and a time, and the time must be in the future. Scheduling the same title for the same time twice is refused, so a double click never queues a second copy.

Scheduled posts appear in your Drafts tab with a “Scheduled” label and the publish date/time displayed. You can click into a scheduled post to edit the content at any point before it goes live. The notice at the top of a scheduled post has a date and time picker: choose a new time and click Save time, or click Cancel schedule to keep it as a plain draft.

To publish a scheduled post early, click Publish now on its row in the Drafts tab.

How Scheduled Publishing Works

Jetonomy publishes scheduled posts through Action Scheduler - the same background queue that powers WooCommerce. It queues one job for the earliest scheduled post, due at that post’s publish time, and queues the next one after it runs. Nothing runs while nothing is scheduled. (WP-Cron is the fallback when Action Scheduler is unavailable.)

A post scheduled for 9:00 AM goes live at the queue’s first run after 9:00 AM, normally within a minute or two. On a site with no visitors and no server cron, the queue runs on the next page view.

If a post’s scheduled time is missed (for example, because the queue did not run during a low-traffic period), Jetonomy will publish it on the next run. It never silently drops a scheduled post.

The Split-Button UI

The publish button in the post composer is a split button:

• Left side: The primary action (defaults to Post Now for new posts, Update for existing drafts).
• Right side (arrow): Opens the options menu with Save as Draft, Schedule, and any other contextual actions.

The left side updates based on context. When you are editing a draft, the left side shows Publish Now and the right side shows options to reschedule or keep as draft.

What’s Next?

Learn the full set of moderation tools available to space moderators: moving, merging, splitting, pinning, closing, and deleting topics.

Topic Management →