March 25th, 2009 Add Your Comments Bookmark and Share

I’ve been having a major problem with scheduled posts for a week now, it just wasn’t working. I could watch posts count down to their scheduled time to go live but then they would just state “Schedule Missed”. Bummer. I was having to go in and do a quick edit, set as published to get anything that had been scheduled live. After some time playing with WordPress and it’s cron I finally got my scheduled posts up and running again, thought this might be of some use to anybody else having WordPress Schedule Missed problems.

So what actually caused my scheduling problem was the fact that I had been dicking around with my WordPress system time. You know that little section in your settings that lets you set your time zone? Because I’m in the UK yet I host in America I’d been shifting it around a bit (just to see if when I post makes any difference to traffic).

My educated guess is that because of this the WordPress cron had run at just the wrong moment and created a state where it then wouldn’t run again. Whatever logic to fire it wasn’t running. After an hour of messing around with the wp-cron.php code I figured it HAD to be a problem with the date/time comparison and the process not being called. No matter how many posts stacked up, no matter how I tried to alter the WordPress time zone to compensate, nothing would get posted – instead sticking as Schedule Missed.

The solution was simplicity itself. I needed to have the cron run again, update the date/time parameters so that from then on it would run OK. All I did was manually call it –

http://www.youblog.com/wp-cron.php

From that point onwards my schedule was back up and running and I can schedule posts to my hearts content. Not a complicated fix at all but it was a problem that was really bugging me.

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Paul B