From Draft to Published, Step by Step.
This is the core workflow: how a caption becomes a scheduled post and then a published one. Draft it, pick where and when it goes, approve it, and let Calendar handle the rest. Here is each step, start to finish.
Three Ways to Make a Post
Every post starts the same way: with words on a card. How you get those words is up to you. Pick whichever fits the moment.
Draft With AI
Ask Calendar to write a single post. It pulls your saved brand voice and per-platform settings and hands you a draft you can edit. The fastest way to get a real post on the board.
Batch Draft a Week
Let Calendar draft a week or more in one pass. It reads your saved posting schedule and fills each slot with a post in the right category. Good for getting ahead in a single sitting.
Write It Yourself
Start from a blank post and type your own words. No AI in the loop unless you want it. Everything else stays the same: pick platforms, set a time, approve.
Drafting With AI
When you ask Calendar to draft a single post, it does not start from nothing. It uses your saved brand voice, the post's category, and your per-platform settings so the result sounds like you and fits each channel. Those settings include things like target length and how many hashtags to use, so a LinkedIn draft and an Instagram draft come out shaped for where they are going.
If you have something specific in mind, give it a focus or idea before you draft. A sentence is enough: a product you want to mention, an angle, a promotion, a question to ask your audience. Calendar steers the draft toward it instead of guessing. No focus is fine too, in which case it works from your category and voice alone.
The draft lands on the card ready to edit. Read it, tighten it, change what you want. It is your post the moment it appears, and nothing publishes until you approve it.
Batch Drafting
Batch drafting is the same drafting engine pointed at your whole schedule at once. Calendar walks your saved per-platform posting schedule, slot by slot, and drafts a post for each one in the category that slot calls for. If your schedule says Tuesday mornings are tips and Thursday afternoons are promotions, that is what each slot gets.
You choose how many weeks to draft in one run. Start with a week to see how it feels, or do more if you want to get well ahead. Images render in the background while you work, so the board fills in with text first and the visuals catch up without making you wait.
When the batch finishes you have a full set of drafts on the calendar, each one editable and none of them approved yet. Go through them at your own pace, fix what needs fixing, and approve the ones you want to go out.
Picking Platforms and Time
Every post carries its own platform choices. On the post itself you select which platforms it goes to, so one post can fan out to several channels or stay on just one. Pick per post; there is no single global setting forcing everything to the same places.
Set the publish time with the quarter-hour picker. Times snap to fifteen-minute marks, which keeps scheduling quick and tidy. The time you set shows in your profile's timezone, so what you see on the card is the local time the post will actually go out, with no math to do in your head.
Approving a Post
Approval is the switch that matters. Approving is what arms a connected post to publish at its scheduled time. A draft can sit on the calendar perfectly set up, but until you approve it, it will not go out. This is the human-in-the-loop checkpoint: nothing publishes that you did not sign off on.
Approval is sticky. Once you approve a post, ordinary changes do not quietly un-approve it. You can edit the wording, swap the image, or drag it to a different day or time, and it stays approved through all of it. That means a small fix the morning of does not accidentally pull the post out of the queue.
Why Approval Stays Put
You already made the call when you approved. Edits and drags are adjustments to a post you have already blessed, not new posts that need a fresh sign-off. If you ever want to hold a post, unapprove it or pull it from the schedule. Approval is yours to give and yours to take back.
Editing a Scheduled Post
A scheduled post is not locked. You can make inline edits right on the card up until the moment it publishes. Change a line, fix a typo, rework the whole thing if you want.
You can also tune the per-platform copy, so the LinkedIn version and the Instagram version can read differently from the same post, and swap the image for a better one. Because approval is sticky, none of these edits un-approve the post; an approved post you tweak the morning of is still armed and still going out at its set time.
What Publishing Does
At the scheduled time a background cron takes over. For connected posts it publishes them through Postproxy to your real accounts, then writes back a status and a permalink so the card shows what happened and links straight to the live post. You get a Posted confirmation email so you know it went out without having to sit and watch.
Unconnected, reminder-mode posts work differently. Instead of publishing, Calendar emails you a reminder to post it yourself at the right time, with the post ready to copy. Same schedule, same approval, but you do the posting on your own accounts. Both paths are real ways to run Calendar.
If a Post Fails
Publishing can fail for reasons outside Calendar's control: a platform hiccup, an expired connection, a temporary outage. When that happens, Calendar does not give up on the first try. It retries up to three times, giving a passing problem a chance to clear on its own.
If all three attempts fail, the post is marked failed and Calendar alerts you so it does not slip by unnoticed. To get it out, open the post, fix whatever caused the failure if you can tell what it was (often a reconnected account), and retry it from the card. The post keeps its content and settings, so retrying is a single action, not a rebuild.