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?
I found that the ‘scheduled posting’ stop working since WP 2.6 after I upgraded from ver 2.5.2 at my site protradeshares.com
Since then I never trust the schedule posting anymore. I just post as and when I can.
So I am not alone..
I faced the exact issue this weekend when I planned to travel and saved a couple of posts for future posing and they were never published. I am using WordPress 2.6.5. Though, this was the first time I faced the issue, it has always worked in the past.
There was no obvious reason for it. I hope there is an answer.
I think this would affect all versions of WordPress. I hope the next version of WordPress takes this issue into account. Future posting is a great tool, but we have to ensure it works.
Word press is great software. I hope Great developers are working always in optimizing the software to give better experience to the users. I hope they got to know this issue and they might fix it soon. I never came across such an issue why because I don’t have an habit to write future posts…lol… :)
This could be an issue with your host as well. I have had problems on some hosts where the wp-cron does not run properly. Try a search on the WordPress forums there might be something there that can help you.