When troubleshooting an issue, do you ever have that feeling of, "well...this should just work, it always just works..." ? Yeah, I get that a lot. In fact, today's quick tip on Kentico MVC gave me this feeling at least 3 times during a project I was recently on. I was tasked with figuring out why page content in our upgraded Kentico EMS 12.0 site was not publishing automatically when the publish from date was set in the future and that time had passed.
The thing is, the ability to have content scheduled to be published in the future has been in the Kentico platform for ages. I'd guess it was probably there all the way back in version 4 or version 5 of the CMS (maybe even earlier). The feature hasn't really changed in any version I can remember. It should. just. work. I didn't think it had anything to do with MVC vs. Portal engine either, because this feature is only really part of the Kentico Administration tool, and not the MVC live site. My head immediately went to the fact it could be a caching issue (it's almost always a caching issue right?), or server side time zone issue, or heck, in the US we just went through the daylight savings time zone change, maybe it was that. But I was wrong on all accounts.
Keep reading after the jump to see the problem illustrated and find out how to ensure your content will be published correctly when set to publish in the future.