publishTime

Publish time, often written as publishTime or publishtime, is the timestamp that marks when a piece of content becomes publicly available. It is distinct from the moment a document is created and from subsequent edits; it may also be scheduled for future release. In many content management systems and publishing workflows, the publish time is a core attribute used to control visibility and ordering.

In practice, publish time serves several roles. It determines when content should appear to readers, influences how items are sorted in lists and feeds, and can drive indexing for search engines. When scheduling is used, a draft may carry a future publish time and transition to public status automatically at that moment. Editors may also adjust the publish time to reflect revised release plans, though such changes can affect version histories and audit trails.

Technical aspects commonly involve standardized date-time representations. Publish time is typically stored in ISO 8601 format, often in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) or with an explicit time zone. An example value is 2025-12-22T14:30:00Z. In metadata, publish time may be exposed through standards such as schema.org datePublished or article:published_time, and can appear in HTML meta tags or JSON-LD blocks to assist search engines and aggregators.

Relation to other timestamps is important: dateCreated records when content was first authored, while dateModified or lastUpdated tracks edits. Publish time interacts with workflow states, localization, and access controls, and may be separate from available or visible times in some multi-stage publishing environments.

See also: dateCreated, dateModified, datePublished, published status, scheduled publishing.