Routines
Routines are how SiteOps keeps working when you are not in the room. A routine is a standing order in plain words — "every Monday at 9:00, a blog post on what our customers ask most" — and it lives in the Routines tab of the Calendar, on the Posts page for content and on each project's own page.
Three kinds of routine run today. Give the agent a task: your words are the whole instruction, and its answer shows on the routine's row. Draft a blog post: every run writes one article for your own site, about the topic you gave or one the writer picks. Draft social posts: every run writes one to five posts for your connected social accounts. Video and email routines are not offered yet — they come back when SiteOps runs them for real, rather than a form that promises one thing and does another.
What happens to a post once a routine has written it is not the routine's call. A blog post follows the trust dial on Settings → Publishing — the same dial every post to your site follows. At Approve first it waits in Posts for your yes; at Runs alone with a veto window it goes out at the next good time, after the window you set; at Runs alone it goes out at the next good time. A social post follows the dial on each of its channels in the same way. A routine's post goes out on its own only when every channel it goes to is set to run alone; otherwise the whole post waits for you. And until you pick an autopilot level every channel starts at Approve first, so every post a routine writes waits for your approval — unless you have set the dial of where it goes to run alone.
Routines answer 'when it is Tuesday'. Their sibling, sequences, answer 'when someone signs up' — flows that run on each person's own clock instead of the calendar's. A trigger event enrolls a person (optionally narrowed by conditions, like plan = free), steps fire at day offsets on a channel each — a day-0 welcome email, a day-3 nudge — and an exit event stops that person's remaining steps. Sequences are never a separate pipeline: enabled ones book their weekly batches into the same queue, on the Calendar, behind the same trust dials as everything else.
Set it up, step by step
0 of 8 done
- Calendar
- Routines
- Calendar
- Routines
- + Routine
- Settings
- Publishing
- Trust
- Calendar
- Posts
- Calendar
- Routines
If something does not work
- My blog routine ran — why didn't the post go out?
- Look at the line under the routine: it says what your Settings → Publishing dial does with its posts. At Approve first the post waits in Posts for your yes. If the line says they go out on their own and one still waits, check that nothing holds it — compliance for a regulated industry, the autopilot set to Manual, or Pause everything — and that your site is connected in Settings → Publishing.
- My blog routine's post is waiting for me: it says it may repeat an article
- When you leave the subject empty, the writer's pick is checked against the articles already live on your site — guides, help, pricing and other product pages never count, only articles. A pick that repeats one is sent back and the writer picks again. If what it then plans still looks like a live article, the post is written but waits for you in review instead of going out on its own, and it names the article it may repeat and why. Read both: approve it if it says something new, or delete it or press Regenerate. A subject you typed yourself is never held for this.
- Can one routine publish on its own and another wait for me?
- Not per routine: every post to your site follows the one Publishing trust dial, whoever wrote it — you, a routine or the assistant. That keeps one answer to "what may go out without me". Set the dial to Approve first while you get to know the writer, and raise it when you trust it.
- A routine has no Edit button
- Either it is a metric watch, or the assistant set it up to do something the form has no words for — book the posts waiting in Posts, refresh your numbers, send the next step of your email sequences. Its row says "Set up by the assistant" and what it does, and it plans no chips on the Calendar — whether its last run went through shows on the row. Saving it through the form would turn it into a different routine, so the form doesn't open it: pause it or delete it here, or ask the assistant to change it.
- Where are video and email routines?
- They aren't running yet, so the form doesn't offer them — a routine that promised a batch of videos and wrote a social post instead would be worse than none. Videos are still made on the Videos page and emails in the Emails page; both come back as routines when SiteOps runs them for real.
- The routine says it runs on UTC time
- A routine keeps the zone it was set up in, and one the assistant made names none, so it runs on UTC. The row and the form say so. Its time in the form is UTC time; change it there and it keeps running on UTC.
- Where do I see what the agent did?
- Under the routine's row — "Its last answer" opens the answer the agent wrote on its latest run. The row also says when it last ran and whether that run went through.
- I paused a routine but one of its posts is still scheduled
- Pausing stops new runs — its Planned chips vanish at once. A post a past run already wrote is real work now, so it stays: skip it in Posts if you don't want it.
- Where did this 'Metric watch' row come from?
- You asked the assistant to keep an eye on a number — something like 'track my cost per purchase and ping me if it passes $5'. The watch checks that metric on its rhythm and speaks only when the value crosses the line you set — one ping on the way over, one when it comes back, and silence the rest of the time. It never invents a value: when the data behind the metric is missing, the check just skips. Pause it or delete it right here; to change the line, ask the assistant for a new watch.
- Should this be a routine or a sequence?
- Ask what starts it. A date or a rhythm — every Tuesday, monthly, 9:00 — is a routine: one run for everyone at once. A person's action — signup, a purchase, going quiet — is a sequence: each person gets the steps on their own clock, offset from their trigger day, and the exit event stops their remaining steps. Both land in the same queue behind the same trust dials, so the choice is about timing, never about safety.