How to set a publication time in WordPress

Filed under: How-To Articles by Miraz on August 30, 2007     Print This Post

Last night I was chatting to a colleague who mentioned the difficulty of having to Publish a post in WordPress before a related event had actually finished. His post should really appear after the event, not during, or before.

As I drove home I wondered why he was having this problem — after all you can easily schedule a post to be published on any date and time you choose. Then I thought that perhaps he, and you readers, might not know this was possible, or how to do it.

Here are two methods for scheduling a WordPress post — through the web interface and with MarsEdit.

Use the web interface

Log in and set about writing your post. If you don’t know how to do this step yet then learn about that first. I know a good book that can help: WordPress 2 Visual Quickstart Guide.

Before you click the Publish button look on the right-hand side of the window and click the plus sign at the right end of the Post Timestamp heading. Some options appear that allow you to set a publication time and date.

Change these to suit your post, then make sure to check the box beside Edit timestamp. When you eventually Publish your post it will display that timestamp (if your theme uses timestamps). More importantly though, if you set the timestamp for a future time or date, the post will not be visible to the public until then.

If you’re logged in you can still view the post as a completed work:

1. While editing the post, check the browser’s address bar. When I wrote this item my trial post had this address: http://miraz.info/wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=11. So, the post id is 11.
2. To view the post I visit my training blog at http://miraz.info/. After that URL I add: ?p=11, like this: http://miraz.info/?p=11.

Use MarsEdit

MarsEdit is a fabulous off-line blog post editor. Posting exclusively through the web interface is a mug’s game. I only do it when I add images to a post so I can use WordPress’s thumbnail creation facility.

1. Write your post in MarsEdit and then click in the body area of the post.
2. Choose Edit Date… from the Post menu. A window appears where you can adjust the time and date.
3. Set the time and date to suit your post, then click OK. When you Publish your post, those settings will be used.

I wonder if anyone really thinks I post all my MacTips at 5 am?