JBoss.orgCommunity Documentation
In most cases, you do not want to publish a content directly, but at a defined date and you can also want the content to be unpublished automatically after that. New properties are added to the new publication plugin, that allows you to manage this:
publication:startPublishedDate_
publication:endPublishedDate_
The Content rendering engine does not know anything about publication dates, so another service needs to manage that. When the publisher sets start/end publication dates, he can "stage" the content. The content will go automatically to the "published" state when the start date arrives and to the "unpublished" state after end date. A cron job checks every hour (or less) all contents which need to be published (the start date in the past and the "staged" state) or unpublished (the end date in the past and the "published" state).
Thus, the publication dates are not mandatory and a content can go to:
Staged: in multi-server mode, the publisher can only put the content to the "staged" state and wait for auto-publication.
Published: in single-server mode, the publisher can directly publish a content (with or without publication dates).