Lightweight Drupal Scheduler

Contrary to other popular content management systems, Drupal innately does not support time based publishing and removal of content. This can be retrofitted with the cron-based Scheduler Module at the costs of a slightly increased memory footprint and decreased usability in the even more overloaded node creation form.

In some cases you may find another solution suitable: Just use Views to hide nodes that have their creation date set in the future. An “Authored on:” field is already present in the node creation form, hence the form won’t gain complexity with this approach.

Views settings dialog (click for fullscreen)

Just edit your frontpage view, add a new filter “Node: Post date”, set it to offset and “NOW”, and you’re done. Check if this setting applies to your frontpage and your feed.

This will probably only work for content that is published in a blog-like fashion, i.e. the content should not be linked from your menus.

Beware: Although the nodes will not be shown on the start page or your feeds, they’re still published and accessible by guessing the URL. Fiddling around with ascending node IDs isn’t that complicated.

Additionally your hidden content may be searchable by Google and other sites, especially if they automagically get notified of new content through pings or XML Sitemaps.

Use the Scheduler module if your content should really be inaccessible.