How to use Active days and Blackout dates for editorial pauses

Every editorial calendar has holes: national holidays, weekends when you don’t want to publish, corporate events, long editorial pauses. AI Content Generator handles these through two Base data fields: Active days (a Mon-Sun toggle row) and Blackout dates (a list of specific dates and ranges to skip). Together they give you total control over which days a campaign publishes without ever having to pause and resume manually.

This tutorial covers both settings end-to-end: what each one does, when to use one vs the other, the difference between per-campaign and site-wide blackouts, and the patterns for common editorial pause scenarios.

Active days — the weekly pattern

The Active days field is seven checkboxes, one per weekday, in the Base data metabox. Ticking a day allows the campaign to publish on it; unticking prevents it. The setting repeats every week — untick Saturday and Sunday once and the campaign never publishes on weekends, forever.

Sensible defaults per campaign type:

• Editorial tutorials → Mon–Fri (weekday reading, weekend readers browse but don’t read new tutorials).
• News summaries → Mon–Sun (news happens on weekends too).
• Weekend evergreen → Sat–Sun (deliberate weekend fill).
• Weekly digest → only Monday (the whole point is Monday delivery).

Blackout dates — the specific exceptions

Blackout dates lets you enumerate specific dates (or date ranges) when the campaign should not publish, regardless of Active days. This is where you configure holidays, vacations, planned pauses.

The field accepts individual dates in YYYY-MM-DD format one per line, or ranges as YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD. Example:

2026-12-24/2026-12-26
2026-12-31/2027-01-02
2027-04-05
2027-05-01

Christmas Eve through Boxing Day, New Year period, Easter Sunday, Labour Day. All four are skipped even if they fall on an Active day.

Step 1 — Set Active days first

Open the campaign editor. In Base data, scroll to the Active days row. Tick the days that match the campaign’s editorial rhythm. This is the weekly baseline that repeats forever.

Save. The Content calendar view immediately reflects the pattern — days you unticked no longer show scheduled slots for this campaign.

Step 2 — Add Blackout dates for known exceptions

Below Active days, paste your holidays and known pauses into the Blackout dates field. Save. The Content calendar shows these dates as blocked-out for this campaign.

Two rules for the blackout list. First, plan ahead 12 months — it takes 3 minutes and you never forget again. Second, use ranges for multi-day events (Christmas period) instead of listing each date individually — cleaner file, less typos.

Step 3 — Pair with Catch up missed articles setting

Below Blackout dates, the “Catch up missed articles after pause” checkbox controls what happens when the blackout ends. If ticked, the campaign queues catch-up generations for the days it missed. If unticked, missed slots are simply lost.

For cornerstone content: enable catch-up. Missing three tutorial slots because of a holiday shouldn’t shrink your total output. For news: disable catch-up. Stale news isn’t news; publishing three “breaking” stories from last week is worse than not publishing them.

Per-campaign vs site-wide blackouts

Every campaign has its own Blackout dates field. That means you can have a “News” campaign that publishes Christmas Day (breaking news is timely) and a “Tutorials” campaign that skips the whole Christmas week (nobody’s reading tutorials on Boxing Day).

If you want a site-wide blackout affecting every campaign, you have to add the dates to each campaign individually. There’s no global blackout setting — that’s on purpose, to preserve per-campaign flexibility.

Patterns for common scenarios

• Editorial team on vacation — add the vacation date range as Blackout on all campaigns except any news campaign that should stay live.
• Recurring weekly rest day — untick that day in Active days. Every campaign that untickes Wednesday takes Wednesday off forever.
• One-off product launch day — add just the launch day as Blackout on marketing campaigns, so your product launch post isn’t buried by auto-generated content.
• Local holidays — enumerate them once per year in Blackout dates. Rename the field mentally to “annual holidays list” and it becomes an artefact you maintain.

Troubleshooting

• Blackout dates don’t seem to apply — date format is wrong. Use YYYY-MM-DD strictly, one per line.
• Blackout applied but campaign still publishes — timezone mismatch. See the WP-Cron timezone article; align WordPress and server timezone.
• Catch up floods the queue after a long blackout — disable catch-up when the blackout is intentional and long.
• Active days unticked but campaign publishes anyway — Fixed times field overrides Active days if misconfigured. Remove entries in Fixed times that fall on unticked days.
• Blackout works this year but not next year — dates are per year, not recurring. Update the list annually.

You’re done

That’s the two-layer pause system: Active days for the weekly baseline, Blackout dates for specific exceptions. Configure both per-campaign, pair with the Catch up checkbox based on the campaign’s editorial value, and the calendar respects your editorial rhythm without you having to manually pause and resume every holiday.