Missed Schedules, Other Not-So-Fun Parts of WordPress, and How to Fix Them

There’s nothing like being a WordPress user who’s supposed to know what’s what and not being able to get a basic thing like posting through a blog editor to work consistently. Since WP 2.9.1 came out I’ve had a helluva time with WordPress on DreamHost. I get strange 404 not found errors and when I’m posting remotely either a) all of the time or b) when planets in a distant as yet unknown galaxy align I get the charming “Missed Schedule” error.

Since, as you might gather I’d rather figure this out than just shrug it off, I’ve been doing some research. I tried a nifty (in theory) plugin, which didn’t seem to work 100% and now I’ve added a wee line, define(‘ALTERNATE_WP_CRON’, true); , to my wp-config.php that is supposed to fix the problem.

I hope.

The lesson here is not to give up and dig into the forums and other WP friends for help (I’ve been bugging Mark Jaquith about it, since he’s responsible for XMLRPC in WP and he’s a friend of mine). Now if you do have trouble with WordPress, here are some of my troubleshooting suggestions (in order):

• Switch back to the default theme. Sometimes themes go wonky. Since it only takes a second and can’t hurt, just do it.
• Remove new sidebar widgets
• Remove all sidebar widgets (testing in the default theme is a good thing here).
• Disable the newest plugin(s) you’ve installed since the trouble started.
• Disable all plugins. Yes, make a note of what you had active.
• Do a WP database check either with GaMerZ WP-DBManager plugin (my suggestion) or the new automatic DB fix in WP 2.9.x (only for those comfy wp-config.php editing and stuff.

Some of the things I don’t suggest are (unless you’re flexing your WP ninja skills):

• Deleting and reinstalling WP
• Mucking about with your database tables through myPHPadmin

Dropping in a fresh copy of a theme (don’t forget about any changes you made from the original…i.e. make a backup copy first) can’t hurt nor can dropping in fresh copies of plugins. Sometimes things get corrupted (especially plugins if an automatic update went awry), so fresh copies are a good time to double check. Speaking of fresh copies, it goes without saying that you need to keep your install of WP and all your plugins up to date. If you can, the automatic upgrade is best, if not the nifty FTP old-school way works too.

If you’re still stumped, if things are still not quite copacetic, time to call in friends to help. Even if that is just posting to the WP forums, you’re stepping it up a notch to getting things fixed.

Now, let’s see if this post does what I’m hoping it does with the fixes I’ve put in place.

Update: Yes it did work. Sorta. Got a 500 error from XML-RPC. Which shouldn’t have happened, but the post posted. Partial victory!