Publish to Notion from Growth Calendar
Finished articles can land in a Notion database as pages, with the body written as real Notion blocks rather than a wall of code.
Two ways of working fit this:
- A review queue. Articles arrive in Notion, someone edits and approves them there, and they go live somewhere else afterwards.
- The place articles are published from, if your site is built on Notion.
Which one you get depends on a single setting, covered under "Setting the public site URL" below.
There is one setting for the whole workspace, under CMS in the top right of Growth Calendar.
What you need
A Notion account, and a database for the articles to go into. Nothing to copy or paste: connecting takes you to Notion, where you choose what to share and come straight back.
Connecting
- Open CMS in the top right of Growth Calendar and select Notion.
- Select Connect and approve on the Notion screen that opens.
- On that screen, select the database articles should go into. Notion only lets the connection see the pages and databases ticked here.
Step 3 is the one that catches people out. Notion has no concept of "everything in the workspace": a database that was not selected is invisible, and the picker in the next step will be empty.
To share a database after the fact, open it in Notion, then use its ••• menu in the top right and Connections > Timothe.
Choosing the database
Notion pages live inside a database, so an article cannot be sent until you pick one. The picker lists the databases shared with the connection, and the settings cannot be saved while it is empty.
Only the title property is written. Any other properties on the database (status, tags, dates) are left alone, so a database with your own workflow columns keeps working.
Setting the public site URL
Notion's own address for a page is a notion.so link into your workspace, which is not where readers go. Growth Calendar deliberately does not record it: if it did, articles published later would link to each other through a private workspace.
If Notion is where your articles are actually published from, fill in Public site URL on the same settings screen, such as https://example.com. Articles are then treated as living at that address plus their slug, and link to each other properly.
If Notion is a review queue and articles go live elsewhere, leave it empty. Articles will still arrive in Notion; they just will not be treated as published anywhere.
Choosing how articles are sent
Once connected, the same screen offers three choices.
Notion has no draft state of its own: a page in a database exists. The difference between the last two is only what Growth Calendar records, which matters if you use the public site URL above. Use your database's own status property for a review workflow.
Sending a single article
Use Publish to CMS at the top right of an article.
Sending the same article twice replaces the contents of the existing Notion page rather than creating a second one. Note that this means edits made inside Notion are overwritten when an article is re-sent from Growth Calendar.
About internal links
Growth Calendar links articles in the same cluster to each other. When an article is sent, links to siblings that already have an address become real URLs; the rest are unwrapped to plain text.
For Notion, an article has an address once the public site URL is set. Without it, no article sent to Notion is linked to by another. Articles still link out to anything already published on a connected CMS.
About images
Images keep their Timothe-hosted addresses and are referenced from the Notion page rather than uploaded into it.
When it does not work
"No databases are shared with this connection"
Nothing was ticked while authorizing, or the database was created afterwards. Open the database in Notion, then use ••• in the top right and Connections > Timothe. Reopen the settings screen and the database will be listed.
"Choose the Notion database to publish into"
The settings were saved without a database. Reopen CMS and pick one.
"Notion rejected the article"
The message carries Notion's own explanation. The usual cause is that access to the database was removed in Notion after it was chosen here: re-share it, or pick a different one.
An article stopped updating and a second copy appeared
The original page was deleted or archived in Notion. Growth Calendar updates the page it created; once that is gone the next send creates a new one.
Other CMSs
WordPress, Ghost and Shopify connect from the same screen. If your site is none of these, a webhook can send articles to an endpoint of your own.