The whole life of a post, from consent screen to takedown.

1. 01

   You connect an account

   From the Channels screen you pick a platform and are sent to that platform’s own sign-in and consent screen. You see the permissions being asked for, you grant them, and you come back to Opal. Opal stores the resulting token encrypted, together with the account’s name and avatar so you can confirm the right account is connected.

2. 02

   You plan the month

   The calendar is laid out per brand: which days carry a post, which channels each post targets, what format it takes. Nothing here is live yet. A slot is an intention, and it stays that way until a draft exists and you have read it.

3. 03

   A draft gets written

   You write it, or a drafting agent proposes one from the brand’s voice and the article or event behind it. Either way the result is a draft: caption, media, target channels, intended time. It is stored in Opal and nowhere else.

4. 04

   You approve it, or you do not

   The draft appears in the validate queue for its brand. You read the caption, look at the media, edit anything you want, then approve or reject. Rejection is final for that draft. Approval is the only thing that makes a post eligible to publish, and it is recorded with the time and the actor.

5. 05

   You make the per-platform choices

   Some platforms require decisions that belong to the account holder, not to the tool. TikTok is the clearest case: who can view the post, whether comments are allowed, and whether the post discloses commercial content. Opal asks for those on the post itself, with no preselected answer, and refuses to approve a TikTok post whose choices are missing.

6. 06

   Opal publishes at the scheduled time

   A scheduled job picks up the posts that are due, decrypts the token for that channel, formats the payload the way that platform expects, and calls the platform’s official API. A transient failure is retried with a backoff. A permanent one is surfaced with the platform’s own error, and the post is held rather than silently dropped.

7. 07

   The result comes back to the calendar

   The post’s state on the grid becomes what actually happened: published with its link, held with its reason, or failed with the platform’s message. Where the platform reports processing time, Opal shows that too instead of pretending the post is already live.

8. 08

   You measure, and you can take it down

   Search Console and GA4 numbers attach back to the content that produced them. If something needs to come down, the takedown runs from inside Opal, against the same API that published it, and writes its own audit row.

9. 09

   You can revoke at any time

   Disconnecting inside Opal deletes the stored token. Revoking on the platform, from its own app-permissions screen, cuts access on the platform side. Either one stops publishing. Opal treats a revoked channel as held, not as an error to work around.

• Publish anything you have not approved in Opal.
• Post to an account you did not connect yourself.
• Ask for a platform password. Every connection goes through the platform’s own sign-in.
• Pass your tokens to a third-party scheduler. Every call is first-party, from our servers.
• Pick a privacy level, a comment setting or a disclosure on your behalf.
• Keep publishing after you revoke access.

The integrations pages list, per platform, the exact permissions Opal requests, what each one grants, what Opal does with it, and how to revoke it. The TikTok page also walks through the per-post choices that TikTok’s content-sharing rules require.