Drafts and scheduling

How to mark articles as drafts so they stay out of production, how future-dated articles behave, and a practical publishing workflow for teams.

Project Broadsheet has two mechanisms for controlling when an article goes live: the draft flag and the date field. Neither requires a database or a publish button; the build itself decides what to include.

Draft articles

Add draft: true to an article's front matter to exclude it from production:

---
title: "Work in progress"
date: 2026-04-18
section: opinion
draft: true
---

• Draft articles do not appear in production builds (npm run build).
• Draft articles do appear in local development (npm start / npm run dev), so you can preview your work before publishing.
• Drafts are excluded from the sitemap, RSS feeds, section indexes, and Pagefind search index.

To publish a draft, remove the draft: true line (or set it to false) and deploy.

Future-dated articles

Setting a future date does not automatically hide an article. Project Broadsheet builds a static site and has no concept of "now" at serve time, so a date of 2026-12-31 does not prevent the article from going live the moment you deploy.

To hold a piece until a specific date:

1. Keep draft: true while you write and edit.
2. On publish day, remove the draft flag and deploy.

If you want automatic future scheduling, consider setting up a CI/CD pipeline that triggers a rebuild on a schedule (e.g., daily at 08:00), so you can queue articles by setting a future date and pairing it with an if_published_after check in your Eleventy config.

A practical publishing workflow

Most solo publishers and small teams find this pattern works well:

1. Create the file under src/content/{section}/ with draft: true.
2. Write and revise locally, previewing with npm start.
3. Commit the draft to your repository. It will deploy but stay hidden from readers.
4. When ready, remove draft: true, commit, and push. The next build publishes it.

For teams using GitHub, keep drafts on a drafts branch and merge to main when an article is ready to publish.

Drafts in preview deployments (Decap CMS)

By default, draft: true articles are excluded from all builds — including Cloudflare Pages preview deployments triggered by pull requests. This means editors reviewing a PR cannot see the article in the preview URL unless the draft flag is removed first.

To make draft articles visible in preview deployments without affecting production, set SHOW_DRAFTS=1 as an environment variable in Cloudflare Pages:

1. Go to your Cloudflare Pages project → Settings → Environment Variables.
2. Add SHOW_DRAFTS with a value of 1.
3. Set the scope to Preview only. Do not add it to the Production environment.

Project Broadsheet's configuration already handles this in two places — no code changes are needed, just the environment variable:

• In src/content/content.11tydata.js, the draft exclusion check reads:

  if (data.draft && process.env.SHOW_DRAFTS !== "1") return true;
  

• In .eleventy.js, collection filters include:

  (!item.data.draft || process.env.SHOW_DRAFTS === "1")
  

With SHOW_DRAFTS=1 set for Preview, editors can open the Cloudflare Pages preview URL on a PR and read the full draft article. Production builds remain unaffected — SHOW_DRAFTS is only present in the Preview environment.

Listing drafts locally

There is no built-in "drafts dashboard." To see what is currently marked as a draft, run:

grep -rl "draft: true" src/content/

This lists every file with the draft flag set.

What to do next

• Write your first article for the full file-creation workflow.
• Front matter reference for all available fields.
• CI/CD with GitHub Actions for scheduled publishing.