Prematurely Published Drafts

A WordPress bug was brought to my attention in which changing the publish status of a post from “Draft” to “Published”, while also giving the post a specific date, for example to schedule it for the future, would cause the post to be unexpectedly published immediately, instead of scheduled for the future date.

I looked into this and discovered the problem is in WordPress’s server-side infrastructure. Specifically, there were changes late last year that expose clients such as MarsEdit to the problem. I submitted a fix for the issue to the WordPress team. Hopefully they will review and agree that it merits including in a future update!

In the mean time, if you use MarsEdit with WordPress, you should beware if you take advantage of both the ability to publish posts as drafts to WordPress, and the ability to later turn that draft into a scheduled post by setting a future date in MarsEdit.

Unfortunately, the only reliable way I know to avoid this problem from MarsEdit is to give your draft post a date before you ever send it to WordPress. If a draft post starts out with a date specified, the bug will not occur on later edits to the post, for example when you switch the publish status to “Published.”

I hope this bug is fixed in a public update to WordPress, soon!