Enable switching between synchronized and unsynchronized publish/expire dates for different language versions of content

[john-thomas-dotcms]

Parent Issue

No response

User Story

User Story

As a content architect, I want to be able to choose between synchronizing publish and expire dates among all language versions of content, or allowing each version to have its own dates, so I can simplify content editor workflows and easily support multiple content models.

Purpose

An existing customer wants an option to sync Date Fields (Publish and Expire Dates) for Multi-Lingual Content. After a recent upgrade, the ability to sync date fields for multi-lingual content is no longer available. Previously, dates were automatically synced across language variations, but now teams must manually update them, leading to increased effort and a higher risk of errors.

Requested Enhancement

• Add an option to enable or disable date field syncing for multi-lingual content.
• Ensure teams can maintain consistency across translations without extra manual effort.

Impact

• Major pain point for the team, causing inefficiencies and potential data inconsistencies.
• High-priority request to reduce manual work and improve accuracy.

Implementation:

We'll implement this as a configuration property, MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC, which allows switching between synchronized and unsynchronized dates.

• Values:
  • TRUE = synchronize dates
  • FALSE = don't synchronize dates
• Default value: FALSE
  • Note: This must be FALSE, because making it TRUE could cause data loss for customers that already have unsynchronized dates.

Acceptance Criteria

1. When MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC is TRUE:
   • Changing the Publish Date in any language version of content changes the Publish Date in all other language versions to match.
   • Changing the Expire Date in any language version of content changes the Expire Date in all other language versions to match.
   • Date changes only happen to Date/Time fields which are set as the Publish Date or Expire Date field in the content type properties.
   • Date changes to other language versions only when the edited version is saved.
2. When MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC is FALSE:
   • Changing the Publish Date in any language version of content does not affect any other dates in any other language versions.
   • Changing the Expire Date in any language version of content does not affect any other dates in any other language versions.
3. The default value of MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC is FALSE.
4. The value of MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC can be changed in all the following ways at a minimum:
   • Via an environment variable (DOT_MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC)
   • Via the System Table (Maintenance portlet -> System Info)
5. Changes to MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC via the System Table take effect without restarting the dotCMS instance.
6. After upgrade, the behavior of existing Publish and Expire date fields does not change.
7. When MULTILINGUAL_DATE_SYNC is changed from FALSE to TRUE:
   • The dates in existing content items are NOT synchronized until the next time the content item is saved.

Proposed Objective

Core Features

Proposed Priority

Priority 2 - Important

External Links... Slack Conversations, Support Tickets, Figma Designs, etc.

No response

Assumptions & Initiation Needs

No response

Quality Assurance Notes & Workarounds

No response

Sub-Tasks & Estimates

No response

[jcastro-dotcms]

Research Results

After debugging the code and going through the process of how Contentlets are automatically published/expired, I found out we already have a configuration property that controls this behavior:

uniquePublishExpireDate

By default, this property is set to false, meaning that dotCMS DOES NOT SYNCHRONIZE any publish/expire dates unless you change it to true. It also seems that we don't have any official documentation on this property, so it makes more sense that Users wouldn't know how to change this behavior. Now, there's another important aspect in this feature that might be adding unnecessary complexity to the process:

When doing my testing locally, I created a Contentlet in English and Spanish. I set the publish date in the English content sooner than the Spanish one. However, they were both getting published when the English date and time was reached, which made no sense considering that the uniquePublishExpireDate parameter was set to false. After discussing it with @jdotcms , we noticed that the field requires Users to enter the publish/expire date and time in UTC. After that, it all started working as expected.

After discussing this with the Falcon Team, we believe this must be improved. We need to allow Users to enter their local time, and have dotCMS do the work to convert the date and time to UTC automatically. Content Authors shouldn't have to deal with that sort of "technical details" as it could generate confusion on their end.

A new GitHub ticket will be created in order to take care of that change.