Scheduling & Archiving

Beyond the basic draft/publish flow (Writing & Publishing), Briter supports scheduling a post to go live at a future instant and archiving a published post out of public view without deleting anything.

Post status

A post's status is derived from its frontmatter at read time (derivePostStatus, lib/content/post-document.ts), in this precedence order:

1. archived: true → archived (wins over everything).
2. draft: true → draft.
3. publishedAt is in the future → scheduled.
4. otherwise → published.

Status is never stored as a separate field — flip the frontmatter and the status follows.

Scheduling

Set publishedAt to a full ISO-8601 datetime in the future to schedule a post:

---
title: My Announcement
publishedAt: 2026-07-01T09:00:00.000Z
draft: false
---

When you save a scheduled post, Briter enqueues a git-sync job whose scheduledFor equals that publishedAt instant. The worker holds the job — listDue() only returns jobs whose scheduledFor has arrived — so nothing reaches git or git history before the publish instant. The post is not committed, not pushed, and not visible on the public site until then.

A date-only publishedAt (e.g. 2026-07-01) is interpreted as midnight UTC; for precise timing use a full datetime with a timezone offset or Z.

Editing a scheduled post re-enqueues it. Thanks to per-slug dedup, the previous pending job is discarded, so only the latest version fires.

Scheduled view

The dashboard's Scheduled tab lists posts being held in the queue, soonest first, via queue.listScheduled() (surfaced by GET /api/queue). Each entry shows the slug and its publish instant.

Archiving

Archiving removes a published post from the public site without deleting the file. It is fully reversible.

• Archiving sets archived: true in the post's frontmatter. The .mdx file stays on disk; the public site hides the post (derivePostStatus returns archived, which the reader filters out).
• Un-archiving clears the flag. The post falls back through the normal draft → scheduled → published classification, so a previously published post becomes public again exactly as it was.

The file is never deleted by archive or un-archive — only re-saved with the flag flipped (app/api/posts/[slug]/archive). Because an archived post is not a future-scheduled state, the change syncs immediately: the worker pushes the updated file and the site drops the post on its next render.

This mirrors the Constitution's portability guarantee — your content is files you own; Briter hides, it does not destroy.

Frontmatter summary

Field	Type	Effect
publishedAt	ISO-8601 datetime	Future instant → scheduled; past/now → published.
draft	boolean	true → never surfaced publicly, regardless of date.
archived	boolean	true → hidden from the public site; reversible. Absent on posts never archived.