When I upgraded my Wordpress version to 2.7, the ability to schedule posts in Wordpress 2.7 no longer worked. I could still schedule a post but the scheduled time would come and go with no future post being published. All that I could see in the Wordpress dashboard was “Missed Schedule” no matter what I tried to fix this problem.

The Missed Scheduled Wordpress Posts Problem

After searching for a solution to Wordpress missed schedule problems it was clear that no-one seemed to know exactly why it was happening and how to fix it. The problem of future posts not working in Wordpress happened to some folks who upgraded from version 2.6.5 and not to others, and it happened to some folks who changed web hosts and again not to others. The Wordpress missed schedule error has also been known to happen to folks on one or two of their blogs and not on their other blogs. So clearly this issue needs to be resolved in future versions of Wordpress but for now there are a few suggestions that have been offered on the Internet.

Some fixes that were suggested for the scheduled Wordpress posts not working problem:

You can see details of what some other fixes others have suggested as well as my fix in the Wordpress support forum in regards to this issue here

Here’s My Wordpress Missed Scheduled Posts Fix:

I’m a simple kind of chick and as such I downloaded Wordpress version 2.6.5 and had a look at the wp-cron.php file in the root directory as well as the cron.php file that resides inside the “wp-includes” folder. The code inside both files is quite different from the the Wordpress 2.7 file versions. In Wordpress 2.7 wp-cron.php there are references to “local-time” and the doing_cron option is set to zero. This is not present in the 2.6.5 versions of these files. So I decided that it might be possible that if your web server time is off by even a few seconds from the Wordpress official time the scheduled post may not go through. This is because the doin_cron argument is set to zero making it absolutely necessary that your web server and your Wordpress time match up pretty much exactly. Now I could have changed something in the code of these files but since I didn’t want to mess with variables I am unfamiliar with, so here’s what I did:

While this fix may not be for everyone and “Frankensteining” (yes I just made that word up) your Wordpress installation is not the best solution, it is a temporary fix until the next version of Wordpress is released and the issue is hopefully resolved.

I have included for download the two Wordpress files needed to fix the missed scheduled post issue in this post. Click on the download button, unzip the files and follow the directions in this post or the readme file that is included with the two files. Please note that these two files were obtained directly from the official Wordpress repository and are guaranteed virus-free.