I have a number of blogs that contain future-dated posts. 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…
Suddenly, some of the posts in my blogs started showing up as “Missed Schedule” instead of “Published”. 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. All you can do is look for them on the Edit Posts screeen and do a Quick Edit on each post manually to switch its status. 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 “Missed Schedule” posts on a number of blogs, that becomes nigh on impossible.
The future-dated blogs I had on my Webhost4SEO account 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). I found that my future-dated blogs on Hostgator also suffered from the “Missed Schedule” problem.
A bit of reseach has shown that the “Missed Schedule” posts problem affect more bloggers than I would have imagined. Apparently, it first raised its head in WordPress 2.7, but seems to have exploded with the release of WordPress 2.9.x. If seems that in the rush to get WP 2.9.0 out, some bugs crept into the cron code. Supposedly, these were corrected in WP 2.9.1, yet people continue to suffer from the bug.
So there must be a fix for it, right?
Not from the WordPress developers at any rate. They seem to be ignoring the issue completely and fixes have only come from within the blogging community.
I tried several fixes that are available and finally found a solution that worked for me. However, everyone’s case seems to be different. All the fixes I tried have worked for someone but not all fixes work for everyone. You’ll need to try several fixes to find the one that works for you. 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 roll your sleeves up and get into messing around with WordPress files, because that’s what it’s going to take to solve the Missed Schedule posts issue if you’ve been affected by it!
You can find out what solutions I tried to fix the WordPress Missed Schedule posts issue on my future-dated blogs.
