Auto-scheduling

Auto-scheduling turns your topic queue into a regular publication cadence without you having to remember to click Generate. Combined with auto-publish, it lets a properly-set-up CiteFlow site produce and ship articles entirely hands-off.

Open /dashboard/content/settings to configure scheduling.

What cadence options are available?

How do you choose the day?

• Weekly and biweekly, pick a day of the week (Monday–Sunday).
• Monthly, pick a day of the month (1–28). We cap at 28 so a monthly schedule fires every month regardless of February.

How do you choose the time?

Granularity is hour-only. You choose the hour (00–23) at which the job should fire. We don't expose minutes because the scheduler tick runs hourly, picking 09:30 would round to either 09:00 or 10:00 anyway, which would be confusing.

Which timezone is used?

• Stored as a full IANA timezone (e.g. Europe/London, America/New_York, Asia/Tokyo).
• Defaults to Europe/London for new tenants.
• All "next scheduled" displays in the dashboard are converted to your selected timezone.

If your team works across timezones, set this to your editor's timezone, they're the one who reviews and approves drafts.

When is the next scheduled generation?

The settings page shows a "Next scheduled generation" line in your selected timezone. This updates immediately when you change cadence, day, hour, or timezone.

How are email notifications sent?

When a scheduled generation completes and the article is ready for review, CiteFlow emails the notification email field.

• Defaults to your login email.
• Override by entering a different address (often the editor or content lead, rather than the account owner).
• One email per article, sent only on draft completion. We don't email on every status transition.

What does the auto-publish toggle do?

The auto-publish switch controls what happens when you approve a generated draft:

• Off, approval is purely an internal sign-off. Click Publish to ship.
• On, approval immediately publishes to every enabled publishing endpoint.

The toggle is disabled until you've configured at least one publishing endpoint and that endpoint has passed its test ping. This prevents auto-publish from silently failing because no destination is wired up.

How do you pause and resume the schedule?

Set cadence to none to pause. Set it back to weekly/biweekly/monthly to resume. Pausing doesn't delete any settings, your notification email, timezone, and auto-publish preference are preserved.

What happens when your trial expires?

Schedules auto-pause when your subscription is not in an active state. Specifically:

• When your trial ends without conversion, scheduling pauses on the next scheduler tick after expiry.
• When you reactivate (convert to paid, or resume after a cancellation grace period), scheduling resumes at your previously configured cadence on the next eligible run.

This avoids the embarrassing "your trial ended last week but we kept publishing in your name" scenario.

Why hour-only granularity?

The scheduler is implemented as an hourly cron tick that evaluates which schedules are due. Sub-hour precision would require either a much faster tick (expensive) or per-tenant timers (operationally fragile). Hour-only is honest about what the underlying mechanism can deliver.

How do you troubleshoot scheduling issues?

"My schedule says 'next run in 7 days' but nothing fires."

Check that your subscription is active (/dashboard/billing). A trial-expired or cancelled subscription auto-pauses scheduling.

"Auto-publish is greyed out."

You need at least one publishing endpoint configured with a successful test result. See publishing overview.

"I'm not getting the email notification."

Check the notification email field, it may still be set to an address you no longer monitor. Also check spam: notifications send from noreply@citeflow.co.uk.

Related

• Topic queue
• Article generation
• Publishing overview