Are Your WordPress Blogs Suffering From “Missed Schedule” Posts?

I run some blogs where I’ve added a number of future dated posts that I want published on specific dates. This way you can queue up content for publication and have WordPress keep the blog active by publishing the posts on their specified dates.

Until, that is, WordPress 2.9.x arrived on the scene…

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.

There’s no easy way to convert ‘Missed Schedule’ posts to ‘published’. No, you have to do a Quick Edit on every affected post and manually change its status to ‘Published’. This isn’t too much of an issue if you only have a few posts that need to be fixed. However, if you have a lot of ‘Missed Schedule’ posts on a number of blogs, that becomes nigh on impossible.

I found that my future-dated blogs on my Webhost4SEO hosting account suffered from the problem. What I like about their hosting packages is that you get multiple Class C IP addresses with your hosting account (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.

Doing a bit of research, I found that there are quite a few people having issues with ‘Missed Schedule’ posts. The first reports of it appearing were just after WordPress 2.7 was made available. 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.

I tried several fixes that are available and finally found a solution that worked for me. However, everyone’s case is unique. 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.

Gary Nugent has been making a full-time living online since 2004. In that time, he’s launched a number of products (not all in the internet marketing niche). He continues to help people by providing tips and advice on his blog. Grab a totally unique version of this article from the Uber Article Directory