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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 :)
