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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 :)
{ 8 comments }
Thank you for the information. I had this problem as well and this was a quick fix and I'm so relieved!
No problem, I'm glad to have been able to help!
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.
Yeh, very frustrating, isn't it? I'm glad you found a solution though – always happy to help :)
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.
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.
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
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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