Easy way to Schedule a future post in WordPress

August 8, 2007

Here is a really easy way to have completed posts get published at a future date. Also, how to check what is scheduled to be posted, and when it will be posted.

When I first started blogging, I posted like crazy for about 2 weeks, and then noting for months. Now, I try to post something every day, or almost every day, this way I can just stay in the habit.

The problem that I run into is that sometimes I might fire off 3 or 4 posts in one day, and then after that, I may work on a more involved post for several days. When I was still using Blogger, what I would do is just save the extra posts as drafts, and then publish them on the day that I didn’t have anything else.
The problem with this is that I would forget to publish them. WordPress makes it incredibly easy to automate this task.

Scheduling a post to be published on a future data and time
Note: This works a lot better if your time zone settings in WordPress are set up correctly.

Step 1: Write, edit and otherwise prepare your post. Whatever you do that makes your writing magical, do it now. Just make sure you are happy with the post, because you may not see it again until it hits the front page.

Step 2: If you are using a 3rd party editor, save the post to your blog as a draft. If you are editing it in WordPress, click “save and continue editing”.

Step 3: In the right hand column, expand “time stamp” and change it to the date that you want to post to appear. Once you have changed the time andor date, the “Edit time stamp” box should check itself (before it wrecks itself).

Step 4: Click the Publish Button.
Yea, that’s it. Now the post will show up on the front page at the time you specified.

Checking to see what is scheduled to be posted, and when
Now that you have scheduled your blogs next 3 months of posts, I’m sure that you would like to know how to see when things are going to be posted. Here are two ways to do it.

The first method: Just go into the site’s administration, and click on “Manage”. Anything with a date in the future, which is not also listed in your “drafts” section at the top of this page, is going to be posted on the date listed. In the picture below, all of the posts in the red box will be posted at the date listed.

The second method: This one is a little harder to figure out when they are being posted, but you won’t get confused with posts that are drafts.

Once you get into site administration, click on “Dashboard” if it isn’t already highlighted. In the “Latest Activity” box, there will be a section titled “Scheduled Entries”. This will list the post title, and the amount of time (roughly) before it is posted. In the picture below, you can see that I have 3 posts scheduled to be posted.

Now, the next tip is how to link to WordPress blog posts that are scheduled to be published.

Also on Port 16:

Posted in Tips, Blogging, WordPress