Future Posted WordPress Articles Can Miss Schedule
One of the benefits of WordPress is you can future post blog articles to go live anytime in the future. But I was surprised that many of my future articles were never posted as expected. They simple Missed Schedule!
What happened? While travelling as I checked my site on my mobile phone, there were no updates. I usually future post while travelling or on vacation to keep the blog current with new content. Though I always believed this system to be fool proof, it was surprising when I logged into WordPress admin to find red notes on the articles “Missed Schedule”.
I checked my site traffic logs for any site downtime during the particular post time, but could not observe any significant downtime. Even if there was a few minutes of busy database / server down issues during the very time, I expected future posting to continue at first instance it is possible. But it seems that does not occur in the current WordPress configuration.
Future posted articles may never go live – Bloggers often future post when they go on long vacations and are busy in real life activities. But this is with the expectation that future posts will get published as per schedule. Now knowing the fact that database / server issues the very moment the post has to be published can prevent the article from going live, till you manually publish it, raises a concern for all bloggers who future post articles.
What WordPress should do?- If WordPress is not able to publish a future posted article, it should recheck frequently every 10 minutes, and publish the article as soon as possible after the publish date, instead of missing schedule and never going live.
A concerned future posting blogger… what are your thoughts?
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This is a timely article, considering that two blog posts I scheduled last week never went live. My point to WordPress is, why have the feature if it only occasionally works? One thought is that WP isn’t aware of the issue, and if they were notified by enough bloggers, a fix might be included in the next WP release. Ugh. Very frustrating, but good to know I’m not the only one to whom this has happened.
I’d never heard of anything like this happening before, so I’m a bit surprised by it. I’m not entirely familiar with how scheduling works in WordPress in terms of the “cron” daemon it uses, but it seems reasonable that it could check for past-due drafts every 10 or 15 minutes with negligible impact on the server.
I agree that if the post can’t go live at the specified time for whatever reason, it needs to go live ASAP after that time. Obviously WordPress knows it couldn’t go live at the proper time, and if that happens it should push it live at the next possible time, not wait for you to publish it.
An excellent catch and it came as a surprise. Its good to know that wordpress handles this but again they should have made the feature of try publish on failure again.
I am sure wordpress will listen to this.
Well, I guess it is a free software. Can’t expect too much, but WordPress is usually the best!