Timeline

Overview

Timeline is a feature by Contentful that allows you to create, schedule and preview multiple upcoming versions of the same digital experience — whether it's a landing page tailored for Black Friday, Cyber Monday, or any other future campaign.

NOTE: The Timeline feature is available on specific plans. Reach out to your Sales representative for more information about feature availability.

With Timeline, you can:

  • Create multiple drafts: Work on different content directions simultaneously without impacting what's currently published.

  • Test ideas safely: Use Timeline as a sandbox for ideation — make micro changes, explore variants, and iterate freely.

  • Plan ahead with precision: Align content updates with campaign schedules by preparing promotional versions well in advance.

  • Preview future content: Visualize how each version will look and behave before scheduling or publishing, ensuring every experience is polished and intentional.

Preview upcoming releases

To preview your releases in Timeline, you have to create a preview platform and include the {timeline} token in your preview URL. 

The {timeline} token is a combined token with the ID of the release and, optionally, the scheduled date, for example, black-friday;2025-03-21T15:39:00.000Z. When previewing current content this value will be empty. For parsing the token, we recommend using the timeline-preview package.

For more information, see the Create a preview platform for Timeline section.

Limitations

  • Timeline entry versions hide most apps in the sidebar 

    • The following apps are not compatible with Timeline versions: Workflows, Bulk Edit, and Deep Clone. There is no workflow step assignments tied to future states.

  • Tasks and comments are not supported on Timeline versions.

  • Timeline is not supported in Studio.

  • Custom apps may need to be adjusted to work properly in the context of Timeline entity versions. For more information, see Working with apps in the context of releases.

  • If future versions are scheduled and you update the current version of an entry, upcoming scheduled versions are not automatically updated.
    Imagine you are changing the field for shipping costs in the current version of the entry from 10 to 5 euros. This change will not be auto-applied to the same field of future versions (e.g. Black Friday).

  • Locale-based scheduling is not supported yet. The Advanced Timeline in the preview centre can be installed to use Timeline.

  • There can be a total of 80 upcoming releases, 30 of them scheduled (with start date). 

Enable Timeline

To enable Timeline in your organization, you must opt in from the environment settings. 

To opt in:

  1. Log in to the Contentful web app.

  2. Click Settings, and select Timeline under “Environment settings”. The Timeline details page is displayed.

    Timeline opt-in

  3. Select the Timeline – multiple drafts option to enable Timeline. 

  4. Optional: Select the Allow scheduling actions (in addition to Timeline) check box if you would like to keep normal entry scheduling through Scheduled publishing.

    Important: Any scheduled entries will not be picked up by Timeline Preview so we strongly recommend you only use Timeline.

  5. Click Save. The Timeline feature is enabled for your organization.

Create a preview platform for Timeline

To create a preview platform:

  1. Log in to the Contentful web app.

  2. Click Settings, and select Content preview under “Environment settings”. The “Content preview” page is displayed.

  3. Click +Create preview platform. The new platform page is displayed.

  4. Enter a relevant name for your platform.

    Timeline: Create preview platform

  5. Select the content types for which you want to enable preview.

  6. In the Preview URL field, include the {timeline} token so you can preview your Timeline releases.

    Timeline testing

  7. Click Save.

Global preview button (optional)

Often, the entries that are part of a release do not have previews defined. To enter the preview, you can add a generic preview entry point to the list view by setting up a preview entry point.

An entry point is a default Contentful entry that opens in preview mode as an alternative to finding a suitable entry, viewing it, and then opening preview mode from that entry. We recommend setting the main page, for example, contentful.com, as the entry point.

How to set up the global preview button

To set up the global preview button:

  1. Log in to the Contentful web app.

  2. Navigate to the “Content” tab and open the entry you want to set up as an entry point.

  3. In the sidebar, navigate to the “Info” tab, and copy the entry ID.

    Timeline: Custom preview tokens

  4. Click Settings, and select Content preview under “Environment settings”. The “Content preview” page is displayed.

  5. Under “Custom preview tokens”, set a custom preview token with the name “contentful/timeline_entry_point_entry_id” (case sensitive) and the target entry ID as a value.

Next steps

Timeline | Contentful Help Center