Docs / Product

Publishing & PRs

Contentcron treats your blog as what it is: part of a codebase. Articles are files, publishing is a commit, and review happens in a pull request.

Publish modes

auto_pr

Default. Each finished article becomes a branch (contentcron/<slug>) and a PR against your default branch.

draft_first

Articles wait in the app as drafts. You read the rendered preview, edit or chat with the assistant, then approve — and the PR opens.

auto_merge

The PR still opens, and Contentcron lands it for you: GitHub merges it once your required checks pass, or right away when the repo has none configured. The PR record stays; the comment revision loop does not.

direct_push

No PR: the article commits straight to your default branch. For blogs where you want full autopilot.

Frontmatter inference

At connect time Contentcron reads a few of your existing posts and infers the frontmatter template: which fields exist, date formats, slug style, and where your image field points. Generated posts follow that template exactly, so they render in your blog with zero config. Repos with no posts yet get a sensible default (title, description, date, tags).

Cover images

When your posts use an image field, each article ships with a designed cover: your site's real palette, one consistent layout, rendered deterministically (no AI-image look). The PNG is committed next to the MDX following your repo's conventions, and the frontmatter points at it — all visible in the PR diff. Optional: your site's logo on the cover (off by default). Both toggles live in project settings.

The revision loop

Comment on the PR and the article revises itself:

  • Conversation and review comments both count; comments within a minute batch into one revision.
  • The revision commits to the same branch and replies with a summary of what changed. Your own pushes to the branch are respected — the file on the branch is the source of truth.
  • !cc-ignore at the start of a comment keeps it out of revisions.
# a review comment on PR #142
"shorten the intro, add a comparison table"

# Contentcron replies after the revise commit
"🔁 Revised per the feedback above:
 - Cut the intro to two sentences
 - Added a comparison table under 'Pick your bottleneck'"

The refinement chat

Every article page has an assistant in the sidebar, and it works with tools rather than talk. It can revise the article, read the revision history, suggest internal links to your other posts, and request or embed screenshots and figures from the library. The recurring edits are one-click style chips — remove AI tells, tighten, simplify, vary rhythm — so common cleanup doesn't need typing. Chat revisions land in the same history as PR-comment revisions.

Refresh PRs

With Search Console connected, Contentcron watches published articles. When one decays — position slipping, clicks halved — it researches what changed, updates the article in place (same URL), and opens a Refresh:PR. At most one automatic refresh per project per day; there's also a manual Refresh button on any published article.