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FuturePost

December 17, 2007 10:27 pm / 117 Comments / shacker

A WordPress plugin aimed primarily at events sites, where you want to be able to timestamp posts in the future but have them appear immediately (by default, WordPress will not display a future timestamped post until its go-live date rolls around). This plugin sets the post_status field to “publish” rather than “future” when publishing a post, even if its timestamp is in the future. Written by Ryan Boren and modified by Andrew Nacin – I’m just hosting it.

Instructions: Install via Add Plugins, or place future-post.php in your plugins directory and activate. Write a post with a future timestamp and hit publish. Notice that it goes live on your site immediately.

Note: This seemingly simple plugin was graciously written by the magical Ryan Boren when I was facing a deadline. He doesn’t have time to maintain/host it, so I agreed to. The plugin was later updated by Andrew Nacin to work with WP 3.5+

Download version 2.0

Contributions / improvements welcome!

Posted in: WordPress

117 Thoughts on “FuturePost”

  1. 1ce9 on April 14, 2008 at 11:57 pm said:

    I was wondering if this plugin works on WP2.5 ? The wordpress.org/extend site states it is compatible up to 2.3

    Thanks for a great plugin!

  2. shacker on April 15, 2008 at 12:07 am said:

    Absolutely – the only plugins that break in 2.5 are ones that modify the back end… and this one doesn’t. I’ll update the compat version in the plugin directory soon.

  3. Annette on April 17, 2008 at 6:27 pm said:

    oooh nice. i’ve been looking for something like this for ages. my gig guide has been running via php right until I swapped to a static WordPress page the other day(tired of updating through PHPmyAdmin). looks like another prod for me to move songpod over to WordPress 2.5.

    thanks Ryan & thanks Scot

    I wonder if anyone has gathered together the bits and pieces to make a band website theme? Seems like all the bits are available now.

  4. Dave on April 19, 2008 at 12:15 pm said:

    I just wanted to say thanks for hosting this plugin — you just saved me a ton of time. WordPress is such a wonderful tool because of its community and people like you.

  5. admin on April 23, 2008 at 1:28 am said:

    Thanks Dave! Beautiful theme you’ve got there on ri.aiga.org.

  6. The Ratsi on May 1, 2008 at 10:18 am said:

    Great little pluggin! Works like * ‘snap!’

    Was wondering if there were a way to have the newly visible posts available in the sidebar calendar too – meaning that the calendar would not just show past post dates but also future postdates (ec3 has been too buggy for me and I didn’t know how difficult that would be).

    Again, great piece of code!

  7. shacker on May 1, 2008 at 10:39 am said:

    Ratsi – Sure you can do that, but that has nothing to do whatsoever with this plugin. You’re talking about adding posts to a particular category and having posts from that category show up in the sidebar. That has no bearing on the timestamp of the post.

  8. baron on May 10, 2008 at 9:22 am said:

    hi there .thanks for plugin:

    Does anybody know if tis script is compatible with WordPress 2.5.1 ?

    Thanks in advance for any help on this!

    regards

  9. shacker on May 14, 2008 at 4:48 pm said:

    baron – See comments above – the plugin does not alter the admin interface and therefore is perfectly compatible with 2.5.x.

  10. Dan on May 25, 2008 at 2:34 pm said:

    Scott,
    Looks like the download link is broken. I would like to give your plugin a shot but can’t seem to get my hands on it.
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/the-future-is-now.1.0.zip

    Thanks,
    Dan

  11. Dan on May 25, 2008 at 2:38 pm said:

    Sorry for the multiple posts but I figured out what was wrong.
    The URL that is currently pointing to the file is
    http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/the-future-is-now.zip

  12. shacker on May 25, 2008 at 2:43 pm said:

    Hey Dan – Odd, I’m not able to reproduce a problem with the link. It points to the plugin’s entry at WP-Extend, and seems to work fine. Where exactly are you seeing the broken link? Thanks.

  13. jsherk on June 2, 2008 at 9:54 am said:

    Well, I didn’t know you could write such an effective plugin with more lines of comments than actual code. There’s only 6 six lines of code… cool!!

    Thanks for the plugin!

    Anyway, here are just some functionality notes and stuff for anybody reading this:

    NOTE #1
    This plugin only affects the status of your post when you hit either the Save button or the Publish button.
    This means that if it’s a future date, then normally WP would assign is a status of future, but this plugin assigns the status as publish instead.
    This also means that if you already have any posts set to a future date, that this plugin will NOT affect them. They will still not be published until that future date is arrived at.
    If you want this plugin to publish them, then simply go to manage posts, cick on the post to edit it, and hit the publish button and it will now be published with it’s future date.

    NOTE #2
    If you want to publish a post now, but you actually don’t want it to appear until the future date, you can:
    (1) deactivate the plugin
    (2) publish your post with the future date
    (3) reactivate the plugin
    This post will now not appear until the future date is actually arrived at.

    NOTE #3
    If you deactivate or remove the plugin, your future posts will still stay published. It does not revert them back to future status.

    Hope this is helpful

  14. james on June 5, 2008 at 7:53 pm said:

    This plugin seriously just made my day! Thank you so much for creating and maintaining this!

  15. baga on June 8, 2008 at 9:38 am said:

    thanks for this great plugin!

    i have the same question as the ratsi: is there a way to show up future posts in the sidebar calendar widget?

    the calendar actually shows only past dates…

  16. shacker on June 8, 2008 at 9:54 am said:

    baga – FuturePost certainly wouldn’t prevent that in any way. If they’re not showing up, then it must be the code for the calendar widget that’s intentionally ignoring them. You’d have to hack the source code of that widget to make it work (or look into other calendar plugins that might not do that filtering).

  17. Ivan on June 12, 2008 at 11:11 pm said:

    Hello,

    I am using this plugin and simply love it. I was wondering, is it possible to make this plugin to work only on specific category if posts, not all of them, since I have one category “Events” and their posts must be published now, but for other categories I want to have timestamped posting.

    Thanks in advance, Ivan

  18. shacker on June 12, 2008 at 11:38 pm said:

    Ivan – I played with this idea for a while tonight, but wasn’t able to get it working. At first thought I could just wrap the hook in is_category(‘3’), but is_category is a template tag, and doesn’t work in plugins. So it’s going to be more complicated than that. If anyone can come up with working code to accomplish that, post here and I’ll update the plugin. Thanks.

  19. MP on June 25, 2008 at 1:52 am said:

    I am having problems with this plugin: I uploaded it to my plugin directory and activated it: no problem there. However, my future posts are still not visible. What could I’ve been doing wrong?

  20. MP on June 25, 2008 at 1:56 am said:

    oops, I’ve already located to problem: the future post thingy didn’t work on already created items: with new ones it works perfectly -> you have no idea how happy this makes me, i’ve been looking for a plugin like this for a long time!

  21. shacker on June 25, 2008 at 8:23 am said:

    MP – Right. The plugin only affects what happens when you click Publish. To make existing future posts live, you can just re-visit then and click Save.

  22. Alessandro on July 24, 2008 at 2:31 pm said:

    thanks for the plugin, before this had to modify some WP sources by hand !

    anyone knows if works with WP 2.6 ?

  23. ivy on July 25, 2008 at 1:47 am said:

    hi there,

    I’m wondering why you need to set future post to “publish”? why not just publish it?

    if it hits the “future” date, will it republish?

    I’m trying to change the “post_status” column from “publish” to future and change the “post_date” and post_date_gmt” to future date, but when reaching the date, I’m not sure why the “post_status” doesn’t change to “publish”? and the post doesn’t apear either.. anyone know if this plugins help?

    thanks!

  24. DC on August 8, 2008 at 2:48 pm said:

    Is there a recommended way for querying future posts in WordPress? Or do I have to drop down and write the query myself?

    Thanks.

  25. shacker on August 12, 2008 at 9:51 am said:

    DC – I could be wrong, but would expect you’d have to do a manual query for that.

  26. Parthatel on August 17, 2008 at 10:08 am said:

    Hi. I tried to use the plugin, but it only works when I’m logged in as admin. Is this a bug? I’m using WordPress 2.6.

  27. shacker on August 17, 2008 at 10:22 am said:

    Parthatel – The plugin does not check for the role of the writer. Testing… I created a non-admin user, logged in as that user, wrote a future post, hit Publish, and it went live immediately. This was with WP 2.6.1. So I think you must be experiencing some other problem.

  28. Seagyn Davis on August 25, 2008 at 2:39 pm said:

    I have been using a custom query to query posts in the future an display them but WordPress does not allow anonymous users to view future posts, ie click on the post and view it.

    It only displays future posts in a certain category, any idea how to make all readers to view it or any progress on only allowing a certain category?

  29. shacker on August 25, 2008 at 3:04 pm said:

    Seagyn – Just use this plugin. Future posts will be properly published and your problem with anonymous users goes away.

  30. Seagyn Davis on August 25, 2008 at 11:21 pm said:

    The problem is that I do not want to publish all posts especially ones that are ‘really’ scheduled for the future.

  31. shacker on August 25, 2008 at 11:42 pm said:

    Ah, I’m with you now Seagyn. Hmm… seems like the answer would be to provide an interface to let the user select whether any given future post should go live now or in the future. Unfortunately I just don’t have time to work on something like that, but if anyone can contribute code for that I’d be happy to incorporate it.

  32. Seagyn Davis on August 25, 2008 at 11:57 pm said:

    If you can point me in the right direction I would be more than willing. Basically what I think would be the best way is to keep this as a separate plugin and create another that allows non-logged in users to view future dated posts. I have tried to play with the query.php but to no avail.

    And pointers?

  33. shacker on August 26, 2008 at 11:36 pm said:

    Seagyn – I don’t have specific pointers, except to say check out existing plugins for examples on how to add things to the admin UI and how to add hooks, etc. Sorry I can’t be more specific – too overwhelmed.

  34. Seagyn Davis on August 27, 2008 at 6:45 am said:

    Its fine thanks have looked at it changed queries with plugins and still no luck hey. There must be some function been called which is like is_admin() or something.

  35. Sarah on September 27, 2008 at 2:14 pm said:

    Just curious, is this compatible with 2.6.x too?

  36. shacker on September 28, 2008 at 9:46 am said:

    Sarah (and everyone else) –

    A) Plugins rarely break when WP is upgraded.

    B) This plugin is so simple it’s almost inconceivable that any WP update could break it.

    C) All you have to do is try it to discover that for yourself.

  37. shacker on September 28, 2008 at 9:57 am said:

    I’ve updated the compatibility ranking on WP/Extend to specify 2.6.

  38. Nokao on October 30, 2008 at 4:27 pm said:

    Oh my god… if that works I resolved every problem I had !!!

    Thank you.

  39. ed on November 23, 2008 at 9:55 am said:

    “allows non-logged in users to view future dated posts…”

    @Seagyn, I found solution, it is in query.php file, anyway future dates don’t display in calendar widget…

    check this

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/141099?replies=2

  40. dzqd on December 16, 2008 at 11:48 am said:

    dont work with 2.7 ….

  41. shacker on December 16, 2008 at 12:45 pm said:

    dzqd: I just did a quick test, and FuturePost worked perfectly with 2.7. Can you tell me how it failed for you?

  42. Mark on January 8, 2009 at 1:17 pm said:

    Worked great before I upgraded to 2.7 It still posts the future post but doesn’t show the link on the calendar…
    Any ideals??

  43. Mark on January 8, 2009 at 1:25 pm said:

    Used ‘musik’ fix from this post…
    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/181245
    it’s working now.

  44. Kristof on January 28, 2009 at 8:57 am said:

    Wow, this plugin is so simple as it is awesome.
    I’ve been searching for a way to completely turn wordpress into an event announcement system, and these few lines of code just do what every other event-plugin fails to do well.

    But I’m running a multi-user blog, so I’d like to show how to set the event date – is there a way to change the text in the publish section too with this plugin (like showing “publish” even if it’s set to the future, and changing “post scheduled for:” to “Event date:”)?

    I know this has few to do with the functionality, but it would make this plugin really complete!

  45. Seags on February 15, 2009 at 6:03 am said:

    @ed thanks for the link bud. Will have a look at creating some sort of hook for it as I do not want to play with the core files 🙂

  46. Heinz on June 29, 2009 at 2:25 am said:

    The plugin seems to work with WP2.8, but future posts do not appear in the search result list. Tried the “search everything”-plugin without success. Any hints?

  47. drchainsaw on July 7, 2009 at 8:50 pm said:

    Does this plug work with 2.8? I have made many post but none will show on calendar in the future. Please advise

  48. admin on July 7, 2009 at 10:29 pm said:

    chainsaw – what “calendar” are you referring to? This plugin just overrides the native WP functionality of not making a post live if it’s future-dated.

  49. Drchainsaw on July 9, 2009 at 11:30 am said:

    The calander that lists posts

  50. admin on July 9, 2009 at 12:17 pm said:

    chainsaw – That’s not a helpful response, and you’re begging the question. Are you talking about some kind of calendar functionality built into a theme you’re using? Something coming from a plugin?

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