Tag Archives: scheduling

Detailed look at scheduling

There has been some discussion on post scheduling and it’s specifics. I wanted to outline it in a bit more detail so people who are interested can get a better understanding.

Firstly, as Nino eloquently put it, scheduled posts are written in stone. There’s currently no way to edit them in any way. These features are on the roadmap, but they don’t exist today, and it’s not clear when we’ll get to them. Fire a comment below if it’s a priority feature for you.

Secondly, posts are scheduled with the service information as it exists right now. I’ll explain this point in a bit more depth, starting with some background. Different services work differently. Facebook gives us a token to use which is supposed to be valid for 60 days. While for WordPress sites, we use your username and password to authenticate.

If you schedule a post to Facebook today, it’ll use the Facebook token we have today. If you schedule the post 90 days in the future, the token we have today should have expired by then. In practice, the token might still work, but it is supposed to fail according to Facebook.

If you schedule a post to WordPress next week, then tomorrow change your WordPress password, and then update your WordPress service on Composer, the post will fail. The old password will be saved along with the scheduled post, and there’s currently no way to change it.

The reason for this design was simplicity. It allowed us to launch the feature now rather than later. At some point we’ll update the architecture so that scheduled posts are linked to the service, and so if you update the service, it updates the scheduled posts.

For all these reasons, we recommend you only schedule posts 30 days or so into the future. In all likelihood, posts scheduled further into the future will work, but the risks of something going wrong increase the longer a scheduled post is kept in the system.

If anything is unclear, or you have any feedback, fire a comment below, send an email, or release a carrier pigeon in our direction. 🙂

Composer supports scheduling

We’ve just deployed the ability to schedule posts. You’ll see a new “Post later” option on the compose screen. If you click it, you’ll get an option to choose the time and date when your message should be delivered.

This feature is brand new, this is the first draft, and it’s still in alpha. It’s best to only schedule posts for a month or so in advance. Further into the future should work, but a month is the safest window. Posts should be delivered within a minute of your specified time, but they could take up to 5 minutes under some circumstances.

We’ll work on making the interface prettier and easier to use, adding a calendar to choose the date, and so on. For now, it should get the job done. If you experience any issues or have any feedback at all, please let us know in the comments.