On Tuesday night I scheduled a post to publish at 08:30 on Wednesday morning. It didn’t happen. Did it have a broken clock, or something?
So I tried to reschedule it. That would surely wor… No! That didn’t work either.
In fact, no matter what I did I just couldn’t get scheduled posts to publish. I would just get a message in my list of posts saying “Missed Schedule”. It turns out I’m not the only person.
I patiently went through every suggestion offered, and not one of them worked. I updated core files (http.php and cron.php) to no effect. I disabled all my plugins. Still nothing.
Other installations
In the end I installed another instance of WordPress 2.9.2 and the latest beta version of WordPress 3.0 (beta 2) and tested those. And guess what: scheduling worked!
Solution
So my solution was to backup everything (blog files and MySQL database), delete all the old files off the server and re-upload them.
Maybe, I reasoned, after the last automatic upgrade something went amiss. Maybe certain key files weren’t overwritten correctly or indeed uploaded at all.
That did the trick. I kind of wished that I’d tried that first. But you live and learn, I guess.