Publishing and promoting pages as news

Once a page has been created it sits in draft status and it will not be seen as news on the site's home page. You can publish a page and promote it by posting the page as news or you can make the page the home page of your site.

Note

A page needs to be saved before you can use any of the "promotion" APIs.

In the remainder of this article you'll see a lot of context use: in this case this is a PnPContext which was obtained via the PnPContextFactory as explained in the overview article and show below:

using (var context = await pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync("SiteToWorkWith"))
{
    // See next chapter on how to use the PnPContext for working with pages
}

Publishing a page

After a page has been created, publishing it is as simple as calling the PublishAsync method.

// Create the page
var page = await context.Web.NewPageAsync();

// Configure the page

// Save the page
await page.SaveAsync("PageA.aspx");

// Publish the page
await page.PublishAsync();

Scheduling the publishing of a page

After a page has been created you can immediately publish the page as described above, but you can also choose to schedule the page publication for a certain date. To do so, you need to use one of the SchedulePublish methods. These methods will verify if the pages library does have scheduled publishing turned on via calling the EnsurePageScheduling method on the connected IWeb. To verify if a page has a pending publication scheduled you can use the ScheduledPublishDate property. This property is a nullable property, if there was no publication scheduled this property will not contain a value. If you want to remove the scheduled publication of a page you need to use one of the RemoveSchedulePublish methods.

// Create the page
var page = await context.Web.NewPageAsync();

// Configure the page

// Save the page
await page.SaveAsync("PageA.aspx");

// Schedule the publication of the page for 24 hours later
var scheduleDate = DateTime.Now + new TimeSpan(24, 0, 0);
await page.SchedulePublishAsync(scheduleDate);

// Verify the set the page publication date
if (ScheduledPublishDate.HasValue)
{
    var pagePublicationDate = page.ScheduledPublishDate.Value;
}

// Removed the scheduled publication again
await page.RemoveSchedulePublishAsync();

Posting a page as news article

A page can get more visibility by posting it as a news post. Calling the PromoteAsNewsArticleAsync method is all you need to do.

// Create the page
var page = await context.Web.NewPageAsync();

// Configure the page

// Save the page
await page.SaveAsync("PageA.aspx");

// Post as news
await page.PromoteAsNewsArticleAsync();

// Publish the page (recommended after posting as news but not required)
await page.PublishAsync();

Demoting a news article back to a regular page

Demoting an existing news post to a regular page can be done with the DemoteNewsArticleAsync method.

// demote as news article
await page.DemoteNewsArticleAsync();

Promoting a page as site home page

If you want to set your page as the site's home page you have two options: you can use the convenient PromoteAsHomePageAsync method on the page object or you can load the web's RootFolder and set the WelcomePage property to the page you want to set as home page. The first approach is the recommended manner.

// Promote as home page of the site

// OPTION 1
await page.PromoteAsHomePageAsync();

// OPTION 2
var web = await context.Web.GetAsync(p => p.RootFolder);
web.RootFolder.WelcomePage = "SitePages/PageA.aspx";
await web.RootFolder.UpdateAsync();