So things have changed, and like most change, this was heralded with some pain and confusion. I’m here to talk a little bit more about the change to the calendar and where and when all the important information can be found.
First off, for those who missed the message, Dragon and Dungeon articles will no longer be posted to the Content Calendar at the beginning of the month. Instead, an article is posted up at the beginning of the week detailing the articles coming later in the week. Also, links to articles are added to the calendar after those articles have gone live.
Why make this change? Well, we’ve been treating this web content in many ways like it’s a monthly magazine, and that’s just not how it’s being developed or delivered. Articles are designed, developed, edited, formatted, and delivered to you individually. When a delay happens at one of those steps, it throws off the planned delivery date for that article, which in the past has meant that we do some juggling with the calendar. With these changes, that juggling will still likely happen, but we have a lot more flexibility with moving articles around than we had before, and hopefully this will mean less dashing of people’s expectations.
So where is that weekly update? It’s obvious that this last week’s article update was missed by some, and we’re working on making that more visible. You can find the update on the main D&D page titled “Magazine Content.” The plan is to have it go up every Monday, and it should show up just like an article. Currently Bart is doing that as an article from his page, but we’ll be moving it to the D&D Group going forward. We’ll also be doing a broadcast to D&D Insiders linking to the article, so if you have everything set up correctly and the web doesn’t eat it, you should be getting emails on the topic starting next week.
We still get article content every week day, and we should find out every week what articles to expect. “But Trevor,” I hear you ask, “what time can we expect those articles?” Well, if you’ve been paying attention this last week, you probably noticed that the articles went out on different times throughout the day, and sometimes people were worried that we were going to miss a day. The plan is to get those articles up at midnight West Coast time just like they were before.
Speaking of the plan, there’s an element to it that, ideally, will become invisible to readers. That is, online articles are being integrated into the same production channel as all other D&D products—which means they go through the same department-wide reviews and approvals as printed rulebooks. Because this is a new process, there are scheduling and procedural kinks to work out. We’ve seen some of them already this week, when articles didn’t appear on Monday or Tuesday. Those articles will still appear this week, but they’ll be bunched up toward the end. As everyone involved adjusts to this and gets into the new groove, you should see things get back to normal. AKA – midnight article updates, Monday update of coming articles clearly presented, and article links hitting the calendar as the articles appear.
There you have it, the new content calendar in a nutshell. Hopefully this covered the basics, but if you have any questions about the change or how we’re communicating weekly updates that this doesn’t answer, please let me know and I’ll do my best to get you a reply.
