Scheduled publishing fields

The scheduled publishing fields are a bit unintuitive and their names are a bit inconsistent with the terminology we use elsewhere in wagtail.

More specifically: (try and answer these questions without looking at the code)

• We have two go_live_at fields. One on Page and one on PageRevision. What is the difference between these?
• go_live means publish and expire means unpublish. Why did we make up these new words?
• We don’t publish pages, we publish revisions. So what does Page.go_live_at actually do? Which revision will it publish?

Heres what I propose:

• Remove Page.go_live_at
• Rename Page.expire_at to Page.unpublish_at
• Rename PageRevision.approved_go_live_at to PageRevision.publish_after (named “after” instead of “at” as publishing entirely depends on whether it’s in moderation or not)

[ababic]

Hi guys. While on this subject… I’ve ran into a few situations where I’ve needed to pull out a list of ‘latest’ things onto a homepage. Those things could have been recently published for the first time, or recently updated.

In other plain Django and other Django-based CMSs I’ve used, this would always be solved by having a last_updated DateTimeField with auto_now=True, but in Wagtail, the revisions process complicates things a little. It seems that the first_published_at field is readily available on the Page, but a last updated at field isn’t. There’s last_revision_created_at, but that’s not quite the same thing, because for the front end, that date isn’t relevant… it’s the date the latest revision was ‘published’ that is relevant.

I know that, technically, I can work that date out by accessing the Pages revisions, but then, the Revision.approved_go_live_at date is what I really need, but that’s always NULL unless the publishing was delayed, so I’ve got to get that OR the Revision.created_at (I think), OR resort to Page.latest_revision_created_at?

So, essentially, what would normally just be Page.objects.all().order_by('-last_updated') is a very complicated set of queries and sub-queries.

What would be really nice is a last_revision_published_at DateTime field on the Page model, that would represent when the page was last ‘publicly’ updated. Is is possible for that to be reliably populated?

[lacymorrow]

Here’s a reference from the source code, I couldn’t find real docs: https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/core/models.py#L251