Have You Been Hit By The WordPress “Missed Schedule” Posts Problem?
I run some blogs where I’ve added a number of future dated posts that I want published on specific dates. This means I can set and forget the blog in the knowledge that WordPress will publish the posts on their specified dates.
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”. If you’ve never heard of “Missed Schedule” posts before, they’re posts that WordPress can’t publish as expected, for some reason.
There’s no easy way to convert “Missed Schedule” posts to “published”. 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. But if you have multiple posts on multiple blogs, it’s an impossible task.
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 online research showed that quite a few bloggers are having problems with “Missed Schedule” posts. Apparently, it first raised its head in WordPress 2.7, but seems to have exploded with the release of WordPress 2.9.x. It seems that the cron code in WP 2.9.0 contained some inadvertent bugs. Supposedly, these were corrected in WP 2.9.1, yet people continue to suffer from the bug.
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.
These fixes require replacing existing WordPress files and/or file edits, so you will need to roll up your sleeves and delve into WordPresses’s innards!
You can find out what solutions I tried to fix the WordPress Missed Schedule posts issue on my future-dated blogs.
Tags: 
