I run some blogs where I’ve added a number of future dated posts that I want published on specific dates. It’s a great way of queuing up a blog with content so you can set and forget the blog, safe in the knowledge that WordPress will do its thing as expected.
That is until WordPress 2.9.x came along…
Some of my blogs started suffering from the dreaded “Missed Schedule” problem. Now, if you’ve not heard of this, it’s an incredibly annoying problem with WordPress where posts that are scheduled to be published don’t actually get published and instead get put into the “Missed Schedule” status.
Helpful as ever, WordPress possesses no quick way of converting posts in such a status into their correct “Published” status. Your only option is to look for the posts on the Edit Posts screen and then manually change the status of each affected post to “Published”. You don’t have to waste too much time changing post statuses if you only have a few “Missed Schedule”posts. However, if you have a lot of posts on a lot of blogs, it would take forever to update them all.
My blogs on Webhost4SEO were affected. One excellent feature of their accounts is that they provide you with multiple Class C IP addresses (having multiple IP addresses means you can spread your sites around so if Google takes a dislike to one of them, they aren’t all tarred with the same brush). Disappointingly, I also found that my blogs on Hostgator were also suffering from the “Missed Schedule” post woes.
A bit of reseach has shown that the “Missed Schedule” posts problem affect more bloggers than I would have imagined. The first reports of it appearing were just after WordPress 2.7 was made available. If seems that in the rush to get WP 2.9.0 out, some bugs crept into the cron code. These were, supposedly, fixed in WP 2.9.1, but reports of people still experiencing the bug still circulated afterwards.
There’s got to be a fix for the “Missed Schedule” posts problem, right?
Don’t hold your breath. WordPress themselves seem to be ignoring the issue completely and it’s fallen to the blogging community to come up with various fixes while waiting for the WordPress developers to fix the problem at source, once and for all.
Several fixes have been made available over the last year. However, everyone’s case seems to be different. All the fixes I tried have worked for someone but not all fixes work for everyone. It’s a matter of trial and error in finding which one suits your setup. And your setup depends on what version of WordPress you’re using, what webhosting company you’re with, what kind of hosting package you have, and the capabilities of the webserver you’ve been assigned.
So prepare to get down and dirty with WordPress to fix blogs affected by “Missed Schedule” posts!
You can find out what solutions I tried to fix the WordPress Missed Schedule posts issue on my future-dated blogs.