Publishing to your CMS

The last mile is the dumbest mile

You now have a pipeline that produces verified, on-voice drafts in content/approved/. Then someone copy-pastes them into the CMS, rebuilds the formatting, writes the meta description from scratch, hunts for internal links, and forgets the image alts. Twenty minutes of clerk work per post, and it's where most of the formatting errors actually enter.

By the end of this lesson, the post you shipped through the drafting system is live on your actual site - turned into a complete publish package by a skill (formatted body, meta title, description, structured data, internal links, alt text), and carried into your CMS by you in about a minute. A human still presses publish. The machine just stops you from being the clipboard.

The publish package: everything but the button

Whatever you publish with, the work splits the same way: production - writing, formatting, metadata, structured data, internal links, alt text - and the handoff, which is getting the finished thing into the system and pressing publish. Production is Claude's job, entirely inside the repo. The handoff is yours, and once production is truly complete it takes about a minute in any CMS.

• Git-native sites (content is markdown in a repo): the best case. Publishing is a pull request - review, diff, merge, history and rollback for free. There is no handoff; the repo is the site.
• Everything else: the skill produces a publish package - one folder holding the formatted body, the metadata, the JSON-LD, and the image alts as separate files - and you paste or import it into your CMS's draft editor.
• Either way, the body is produced in the format your site actually uses (markdown, HTML, or your CMS's flavor of rich text), so nothing gets rebuilt by hand on the other side.

If your site is git-native, prefer that route: a publishing PR gives you review, rollback, and history for free, and it's the workflow your engineers already trust.

The publish-cms skill

The skill reads one file from content/approved/ and turns it into a fully-dressed publish package. Formatting and metadata are exactly the kind of mechanical work that belongs in code.

1. Define the furniture checklist in the skill: meta title (under 60 characters), meta description (under 160), FAQ JSON-LD when the post has Q&A material, internal links to 3 related posts chosen from content/published/, and alt text for every image.
2. Have the skill produce the body in your site's exact format - heading levels, slug conventions, image placement - so nothing needs rebuilding in the CMS editor.
3. Output everything as a package folder next to the approved file: body, metadata file, JSON-LD file, and a staging report.
4. The staging report says what was produced, which internal links were chosen and why, and what's left for the human: carry the package into the CMS, review, publish.
5. The skill never publishes anything anywhere. It ends at files. That's not a limitation - it's the gate.

---
name: publish-cms
description: Turn one approved post into a complete publish package -
  body formatted for the site, meta title/description, FAQ JSON-LD,
  3 internal links from published/, image alts - plus a staging
  report. Input: a file in content/approved/. Output: files only.
  A human carries the package into the CMS and presses publish.
argument-hint: <approved-file>
disable-model-invocation: true
---

Run it, review it, publish by hand

1. Take the post you shipped through the drafting system in module 1 and run /publish-cms on it.
2. Open the package and review like a publisher: the body reads clean in your site's format, metadata reads well, the 3 internal links make sense, images have alts.
3. Carry it into your CMS - paste or import - and press publish yourself, inside the CMS.
4. Move the source file from approved/ to published/ and record the live URL plus a date - the archive feeds everything else.

Total human time per post once this is smooth: about six minutes - five of review, one of handoff. The clerk work is gone; the judgment stays.

Do this now

Sources and further reading

• Claude Code skills docs
• RSL/A: a marketing agency run on Claude Code