Publishr for Craft CMS
Installation
composer require justinholtweb/craft-publishr
php craft plugin/install publishr
Publishr needs Craft CMS 5.3 or later and PHP 8.2 or later. It has no runtime dependencies.
Editions
Both editions are paid. Lite is $59 and Pro is $129.
Lite plans the work: the calendar, the board, stages, assignments, deadlines, comments and history. Pro governs it: publish requirements, freshness reviews, notifications and the governance report. Neither is capped by volume, and Lite's only limit is five editorial stages.
| Lite | Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Month calendar, all four lanes | ✓ | ✓ |
| Board and overview | ✓ | ✓ |
| Editorial stages | up to 5 | unlimited |
| Assignments, deadlines, comments, history | ✓ | ✓ |
| Publish requirements | ✓ | |
| Freshness reviews and policies | ✓ | |
| Notifications and daily digest | ✓ | |
| Governance report and CSV export | ✓ | |
| Section subscriptions | ✓ |
What installing does
Five editorial stages are created — Idea, In progress, Needs edit, Ready and Published — so the board works before you have opened the settings screen. They are ordinary stages: rename them, recolour them, reorder them, or replace them entirely.
Nothing else happens. No entries are touched, and nothing about how your site publishes changes.
Bringing your content onto the calendar
Publishr is almost always installed on a site with several years of entries already on it, and a calendar that starts empty is a calendar that stays empty.
php craft publishr/track
php craft publishr/track --section=news
php craft publishr/track --dryRun=1
Entries that are already live land on the published stage; everything else lands on the default stage. Dropping three years of published articles onto "Idea" would produce a board claiming the whole archive is unwritten.
From then on, new entries are tracked automatically as they are saved. That can be switched off in Settings → General if you would rather add pieces to the calendar deliberately.
Keeping it running
One command on cron:
*/10 * * * * cd /path/to/site && php craft publishr/sweep
0 8 * * * cd /path/to/site && php craft publishr/sweep --digest=1
Everything the sweep does is idempotent and every reminder it raises carries a day-scoped deduplication key, so running it every ten minutes and running it once a day are both correct. The difference is only how promptly a reminder arrives.
No cron? Publishr queues the same sweep from Craft's garbage collection. It still runs, just less often — which is the difference between a reminder arriving late and never arriving at all.
Two plugins that make it better
Neither is required, and Publishr works completely without both.
- Alarm Clock — pieces move to the published stage within a minute of going live, instead of at the next sweep. See Alarm Clock and RedPen.
- RedPen — adds a "Passes RedPen" publish requirement, so a piece cannot be signed off while it breaks your house style guide.
Uninstalling
php craft plugin/uninstall publishr
Every Publishr table is dropped, including the history. Your content is untouched — Publishr never owns an entry, only a record beside it, so uninstalling leaves every entry exactly as public as it was.