“Missed Schedule” posts in WordPress 2.9, and a fix

by Chris on December 21, 2009

Listen to the time

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Photo credit: lrargerich

I learned a lesson today – never take smooth software upgrades for granted. I’ve been using WordPress for over six years now (blimey, that’s actually quite scary) and have never had a hitch with it. This morning, though, after upgrading to WP 2.9 a post missed its scheduled post time.

It turns out this isn’t so much a problem with WordPress as a problem with a slow system. The process that publishes scheduled posts timed out and didn’t complete the job. The problem is, I guess, that WP 2.9 is a little slower than WP 2.8… at least on my server!

That’s very frustrating because, as I’ve written before, I always schedule my posts in advance. I just prefer to work ahead of myself rather than hitting publish as soon as I’ve finished writing something.

Fortunately, there’s a fix for this, worked out by some of the brilliant people at the WordPress.org forums. It’s a temporary workaround until a patched version of WordPress is released, but it will at least help you avoid missing the scheduled publish time again! You’ll have to be a bit techy to make the change, as it’s an alteration to some of WordPress’ code.

The file you are changing is /ROOT/wp-includes/cron.php, and the changed line can be found here.

I’ve made the change to Geek-Speak’s cron.php file, and am about to schedule this post to go live in a few minutes… if you’re reading it, the patch works :)

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{ 8 comments }

Juliet Douglas December 21, 2009 at 7:23 pm

Thank you for the information. I had this problem as well and this was a quick fix and I'm so relieved!

Chris H December 21, 2009 at 8:02 pm

No problem, I'm glad to have been able to help!

Brad December 22, 2009 at 2:26 am

Thanks for the help mate. I schudule 50% of the posts on my site and I was devastated when I saw a number of them being missed this morning. Sucks that we have to deal with slow shared servers.

Chris H December 22, 2009 at 8:52 am

Yeh, very frustrating, isn't it? I'm glad you found a solution though – always happy to help :)

hayley December 22, 2009 at 11:28 pm

Was really annoyed to wake up from a 15hr sleep with all my posts still queued. Never had that before. Thanks to your fix it looks lke it solved.

Chris H December 23, 2009 at 9:25 am

Thanks Hayley – it's definitely fixed the problem for me; this morning's scheduled post went live as normal.

I hasten to add that I only found the fix, I didn't come up with it myself. I've edited the post to make that a bit clearer! Having said that… I'm happy to have helped you find the solution too.

EricaMueller January 2, 2010 at 12:50 am

I had this problem with 2.7.1. I ended up having to revert to an earlier version until the next version was released. I had to do this not only for myself, but all my clients who like to schedule posts…

Fortunately, I haven't experienced any problems with 2.9.

Going to keep this post in mind tho… just in case! haha

Chris H January 2, 2010 at 7:44 pm

Glad you've not had any problems with 2.9! I'd have expected the later versions to show up this problem more as they get more and more complex… but obviously not :)

Hopefully you'll never come across this, but if you do, you know where to find me.

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