Schedule TYPO3 pages and short-lived redirects from chat

A campaign page should go live at a set time and come down again when the offer ends. With TYPO3 MCP your AI assistant can schedule TYPO3 pages for you. It sets a start and an end time on the page and adds a short link for the same window. We ran it on our demo install. A hidden page went live at its start time, its short link answered with it, and both expired at the end time without anyone touching them. MCP, the Model Context Protocol, lets an assistant such as Claude work inside TYPO3 through tools that AI Foundation provides for free. One thing the schedule does not do for you: refresh menus on pages that were cached before the start time.

Scheduling is built into TYPO3. Every page has a start time and an end time, in the page properties under Access as Publish Date and Expiration Date. Redirects carry the same two fields. Between the two times the record is live, outside them it is not, and TYPO3 decides that on every request.

On our demo the Mustermann Outdoor site has a hidden page, Winter Collection, prepared for a later launch. One request set it up: Put our Winter Collection page live in a few minutes and take it down again ten minutes later. Add a short link /winter that points to it only for that time. Dry run first.

The assistant wrote three things in one batch:

• The page: visible, with a start time and an end time.
• A temporary redirect: /winter to the Winter Collection page, status 302, because the link should not outlive the campaign.
• The same window on both: the redirect has the page's start and end time, so the short link never points at a page that is not live.

Behind the answer sit these steps:

1. Times. The assistant turned the request into exact start and end times. TYPO3 stores them as timestamps and shows them in the backend's time zone.
2. Dry run. records_apply, AI Foundation's tool for writing many records in one all-or-nothing call, first ran with dryRun. The server reported one page update and one new redirect, then rolled both back.
3. Write. The same call without the dry run wrote both in one batch, on Live. The answer carried the batch ID.
4. Check. The assistant read the page and the redirect back: visible, both times set, the same window on each. In the backend, the page properties showed the times under Access, and the redirect list showed /winter with status 302.

The first dry run was refused, and nothing was written. The batch also carried a note on the redirect, a field our backend user may not write. All-or-nothing means the whole call stops and names the field. Without the note, it passed.

Then we watched the website. Before the start time the page and /winter answered 404. Right after it, the page answered 200 and /winter forwarded to it. After the end time both answered 404 again. Nobody touched the page in between.

The page itself and its short link switched at our first check after each time. The main menu did not, at first. The home page and other pages that had been cached before the start time still showed the old menu, without the new page. After a page cache clear, which the assistant does with cache_clear, the menu showed it. At the end time the menu dropped the page again.

So plan one more step for a launch: clear the page cache once the start time has passed. You can ask your assistant for it at that moment, or ask your integrator whether the site's cache settings already follow page start times.

Put it back

We took everything back on our demo in one step: records_undo with the batch ID, after a dry run of the undo. It hid the Winter Collection page again, cleared both times and removed the short link. We cleared the page caches and checked the website: the home page looked exactly as before, and the page and /winter answered 404.

Redirects act live. AI Foundation can hold page changes in a TYPO3 draft workspace for review; a redirect is not versioned there and works at once, within its times.

What the assistant cannot do for you

• It cannot refresh a cached menu at the start time. Clear the page cache once the page is live, or have your integrator set the cache to follow start times.
• It does not pick your times. Say the time zone you mean, and read the times back before the write.
• It writes only what your backend user may write. A field you may not edit stops the whole batch, and nothing is written.
• It does not know your campaign. Whether the offer, the prices and the short link are right is your call.

For redirects in general, such as moved pages and old URLs, see our guide to TYPO3 redirects.

The video for this episode shows the request in Claude on our demo install: put the Winter Collection page live at 13:02, take it down again at 13:12 and add a short link /winter, dry run first. You see the first dry run rejected with nothing written, then the applied change. In TYPO3 the video shows the timer icon on Winter Collection in the page tree, "Publish Date" and "Expiration Date" on the Access tab of the page properties, and /winter with status code 302 in Redirect Management. On the website it shows "Page Not Found" before 13:02 and the Winter Collection page reached through /winter at 13:02. Shown in Claude; other MCP assistants work too.

This job uses AI Foundation's core tools, which are free and open source, no licence key, no registration. AI Assistant, AI Accessibility, AI Chatbot and AI Search add their own MCP tools for writing, translation, alt text, chatbots and search. Each needs its own licence. Together with AI Foundation they bring 100+ MCP tools.

What your assistant reads, it sends to its vendor, as with any chat. Keep that in mind before you let it read pages that are not public yet.

The other post of this episode follows a TYPO3 editor through a working day with MCP, four jobs from chat. Episode 8 turns to images without alt text and to pages and news written into TYPO3. A schedule pairs well with episode 6, where one request copied a campaign page with all its subpages: copy the campaign, then put it on a timer. If you are new to the series, start with TYPO3 MCP use cases: what you can hand to an AI assistant, on one map.

The series comes from T3Planet by NITSAN Technologies, a TYPO3 Association Gold Member with more than 15 years of TYPO3 work. Its episodes are written by Jürgen, our AI Consultant for TYPO3. Every episode runs its job on our demo install before it is published.

All episodes of MCP in Practice for TYPO3