Editorial calendar for Craft CMS 5
Craft knows when it was published. Publishr knows the rest.
Craft does not know who is writing the next piece, when it is due, who has to sign it off, or that the pricing page has not been checked since 2021. Publishr keeps that second set of facts beside the content and puts them on a calendar. Lite plans the work. Pro governs it.
Read-only in your templates
Everything on craft.publishr reads. Anything that changes a piece goes through a controller with a permission check on it, because a template is not the place a piece gets signed off from.
{% set item = craft.publishr.item(entry) %}
{% if item %}
{{ item.getStage().name }}
{{ item.getAssignee().friendlyName ?? 'Unassigned' }}
{% if item.isOverdue() %}{{ item.daysUntilDue()|abs }} days late{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{# Next month's plan, publish lane only #}
{% for day, events in craft.publishr.month(2026, 6, ['publish']) %}
<h3>{{ day|date('j F') }}</h3>
{% for event in events %}<p>{{ event.entry.title }}</p>{% endfor %}
{% endfor %}Features
Lite covers the calendar, the board, stages, assignments and comments. Pro adds requirements, freshness, notifications and the report.
An entry is not an event
A piece has up to four dates worth seeing: when the work is due, when it publishes, when it expires and when it is next up for review. Each gets its own lane, so one piece can turn up on four different days in a month. That is the point.
- Drafts that have never been published are on it
- Drag a pip and the date its lane stands for is the one that moves
A stage is not a status
Craft answers "is this public". Publishr answers "where is this in the process". The two run side by side and never merge, so Publishr cannot break a front end. Switch it off and every entry is exactly as public as it was.
- Idea, In progress, Needs edit, Ready, Published, or whatever your desk calls them
- The stage survives every draft created, applied and thrown away underneath it
Owners and deadlines
Who owns this piece now, and when the work is due. Both are separate from the entry's author and post date, because the person who wrote it in March is rarely the person fixing it in October.
- Days count in the site's time zone, at whole-day granularity
- A met deadline is cleared when the piece goes live
Comments beside the piece, not in it
A threaded conversation stored next to the entry rather than in a field on it. It never renders on the site, never lands in a revision, and survives the draft it was written against. @name tells somebody.
Requirements at sign-off, not at save
Pro adds a checklist a piece must pass before it reaches a gated stage: required fields, a lead image with alt text, a minimum length, no open comments, boxes a person ticks, and a clean pass from RedPen if you have it.
- Required blocks the move; advisory only warns
- An override is allowed, and the overrider's name goes in the history
"I don't know" is never "no"
A requirement that cannot run is skipped, and a skipped requirement never blocks. RedPen not installed, a timeout, a custom gate that throws: none of those mean the copy failed. They mean nobody read it.
- Uninstalling an optional plugin cannot lock a desk out of sign-off
Freshness reviews
Nothing on a website tells you it has gone out of date. Pro policies say how long a kind of content stays good for, and the clock runs from the last time a person said it was still true, not from the last re-save.
- Never reviewed? The clock runs from the post date, so the first sweep finds the real backlog
A report on the desk, not the site
Pro's governance report shows how much of the site is on the calendar at all, where work piles up, who is carrying what, what is late, unowned or stale, and how much shipped each week. Plus a morning digest for anybody with something on their desk.
- Median age per stage, not mean: every desk has one piece abandoned for eight months
- CSV export
Alarm Clock is the engine
Craft fires no event when the clock passes a post date, so Publishr owns no scheduler. Alarm Clock notices the crossing and Publishr reacts: the piece moves to the published stage within a minute, its met deadline is cleared, and the freshness clock starts from the scheduled instant. Without Alarm Clock, one cron line catches up instead.
# Idempotent. Every ten minutes and once a day are both correct;
# the only difference is how promptly a reminder arrives.
*/10 * * * * cd /path/to/site && php craft publishr/sweep
0 8 * * * cd /path/to/site && php craft publishr/sweep --digest=1
# Bring the content you already have onto the calendar
php craft publishr/track --section=news --dryRun=1Frequently Asked Questions
The questions worth answering before you install it.
There are two editions and both are paid. Lite is $59 and plans the work: the month calendar with all four lanes, the board, up to five editorial stages, assignments, deadlines, editorial comments and the stage history. Pro is $129 and governs it: unlimited stages, publish requirements, freshness reviews, notifications and the daily digest, the governance report with CSV export, and section subscriptions. Neither edition is capped by volume.
No. An editorial stage is metadata beside an entry, never a replacement for Craft's status. Turn the plugin off and every entry is exactly as public as it was. The one exception is opt-in and off by default: Refuse to publish an entry whose requirements fail, for sites with regulated copy that need it.
Neither. With Alarm Clock, a piece moves to the published stage within a minute of going live; without it, the sweep catches up on its next run. RedPen is only needed for the Passes RedPen requirement, which reports itself as unavailable and is skipped when RedPen is not installed.
Because it is due on the 4th, out on the 8th and up for review in November. Each date gets its own lane. Untick the lanes you do not want.
Nothing. The editorial record belongs to the canonical entry, so the stage, owner and deadline survive every draft created, applied and thrown away underneath them.
Yes. An override writes a history row naming the person and the requirements they overruled. The history is append-only and outlives the entry: "we published this and then deleted it" is exactly what an audit trail is for.
No. The five-stage cap is a downgrade, not a deletion. You keep every stage and every piece on them; Lite stops you creating the sixth. Requirements and policies stop being enforced, are not deleted, and start working again when the licence is renewed.
Only email, through Craft's own mailer, to users of your site. It makes no outbound requests of any kind.
Craft CMS 5.3+, PHP 8.2+. Optionally Alarm Clock 5.0+ and RedPen 5.0+.
Lite plans the work, Pro governs it
Lite is $59: the four-lane calendar, the board, five stages, assignments, deadlines and comments. Pro is $129 and adds unlimited stages, publish requirements, freshness reviews, notifications and the governance report.