Scheduling a page for unpublication.

NoahBoswell

Hi there,

 

Is there a way to schedule a page for unpublication? I understand that there is a feature to schedule for publication, and I use it everyday. However after my class ends, I want pages such as study guide answer keys and things such as that to automatically unpublish from the modules.

 

If this isn't a feature, will it be soon?

 

Thanks,

Noah

James

It used to be that you could not schedule pages to be published. This functionality was available with files, but not pages.

Community users made the feature request (probably more than once). Eventually Canvas added the ability to schedule the publishing of pages. They did not add the scheduling of unpublishing at the same time. I don't know where the feature came from. It might have been from an Instructure software engineer or it might have been a community contribution through GitHub. Canvas product managers did have to sign off on it, though. That means that they likely considered whether they wanted to add the ability to unpublish and they decided not to implement it. We are not privy to that discussion.

Scheduling the unpublishing may happen somewhere down the line. Canvas often rolls out changes in stages but normally those are on major changes so I wouldn't expect it here. There has been no movement on this since the initial rollout and it was potentially a small adjustment when they created it. They could have added a date to unpublish at the same time the added the ability to publish, but decided not to. It may be that the conditional release functionality they borrowed didn't allow for unpublishing and that it would take more effort to implement it.

Canvas like to keep the interface simple, so if there isn't a large demand for unpublishing pages, then it may not. Currently, pages are consistent with modules in that you can unlock them at a certain date but not lock them later. My guess is that they considered whether to allow for unpublishing of pages and decided against it, although they might have borrowed the functionality for modules to use with pages.

Sometimes the answer is that that Canvas does not do this. There may be work-arounds (I'll give three later in this message), but those may not work for everyone.

Feature requests are how Instructure finds out about and gauges the popularity of ideas. They do not actively monitor questions like this one to determine ideas. If you want them to start thinking about something, you need to put it into the ideas. @Chris_Hofer gave the correct answer to that. It was decided in the Community that anyone could mark an answer as correct -- not just the original poster -- and even if the post didn't answer the original question (someone else came along later and got an answer to their question).

Here are three work arounds that I thought of. Understand that they are just that, which means they may not work for your situation. Like with many things, it becomes a matter of whether the result it is worth the effort.

• Use files instead of pages. This allows you to schedule both sides of the file availability. This is what people used to have to do for pages before you could schedule them. This is a Canvas-native solution (other than preparing the document). There are some limitations to static documents that Canvas pages may not have.
• Set a reminder on your calendar to go through and hide the page at a certain time. When that reminder comes up, manually hide the page. You don't have to use a calendar, but hopefully you get the idea.
• Use a script to unpublish a page when a certain time is met. Then schedule that script to run every day. I would create two files -- the script itself and a text file that contains the URLs and dates they should be unpublished. That script would need to run on an machine that was powered on when the script is set to ran. This requires some technical skills (programming) although the script is not short and the logic is relatively straight forward.