Publish, schedule, and review an article

Firefly keeps publishing under merchant control. You can save an article as a draft on every plan, publish an ordinary draft manually, or use scheduled publishing when the active plan includes scheduling.

The two views use the same neutral draft. One shows the real-time preflight and saved review status; the other confirms that the Shopify article remains in Draft status.

Review before publishing

1. Open the Shopify article in Firefly’s visual editor.
2. Review the title, body, summary, tags, featured image, alt text, links, product claims, and search presentation.
3. Use Publishing preflight to inspect accessibility, heading structure, links, search presentation, and publishing risks.
4. Resolve blocking issues and assess any remaining recommendations.
5. In Article settings, choose Draft, Published, or Scheduled.
6. Save the article.

Changing the status to Published is an explicit publishing decision. AI generation by itself never selects that status or publishes the draft.

Schedule an article

Scheduled publishing is available on Starter, Growth, and Pro. Add-on Tokens increase AI capacity only; they do not unlock scheduling.

From the article editor:

1. Choose Scheduled under Article settings.
2. Select the publication date and time.
3. Save the article.

From Publishing schedule, you can also:

• view the calendar in the Shopify store’s timezone;
• select one or more unpublished articles;
• schedule a batch at a fixed interval;
• review conflicts within 30 minutes before submission;
• reschedule or publish a scheduled article immediately;
• cancel a future schedule and keep the article as a draft.

An existing future schedule remains visible after a downgrade. It can be cancelled back to a draft, but creating, changing, or immediately publishing a schedule requires scheduling access.

The calendar uses the Shopify store’s timezone. Test-store counts and event content are redacted; the current cadence guidance and calendar controls remain visible.

Use Pro publishing approval

Pro can enforce a separate approval decision before publication or scheduling.

1. Open Settings → General.
2. Enable Require human review before publishing and save Settings through Shopify’s unsaved-changes bar.
3. Edit the article and save the content as a Draft.
4. In Publishing preflight, set Saved review status to In review while it is being checked.
5. After review, select Approved and choose Save review status.
6. Publish or schedule the unchanged approved article.

When enforcement is enabled, the server checks the approval immediately before publication or scheduling. New content changes reset the article to Drafting, so the changed version must be saved and approved again.

Review status can still be recorded when enforcement is off, but it does not block publishing until Require human review before publishing is enabled.

Approvals and translations

For a localized publication, the source Shopify article must already be live. When approval enforcement is on, both the source article and the unchanged saved translation must be Approved before Firefly can publish or schedule the localized version.

Safe recovery and cancellation

• Cancelling a schedule keeps the article as a draft.
• A plan downgrade does not delete existing articles, images, versions, schedules, or translations.
• Restoring an older version of an approved live or scheduled article may require moving it to Draft first so reviewed live content is not changed without a new approval.
• If a batch scheduling action partially succeeds, Firefly preserves the successful schedules and reports the failed article IDs for retry.