TAO Schedule Update Plugin

A simple WordPress Plugin to Schedule Content Updates

Motivation:

These days WordPress is scarcely used as a pure blog. Most of the time it is used as a full blown CMS with many additional requirements. Especially the publishing workflow for posts and pages as well as their changes becomes demanding. Using plugins like visual composer or advaced custom fields with their flexbox addon it becomes common to build huge startpages, subsites and langpages using a simple, understandable visual editor insted of bolting them together using custom post types. If this is a good and DRY way to go is not to discuss here 🙂

A Problem arises as soon as you try updating such a complex single page at a specific date in the future – there is no easy way so schedule changes to already published wordpress pages inside the wordpress core functionality. Existing plugins that try to tackle this problem are often far from feature complete and try to re-use the revision system. The experience we made with our customers showed, that the revisions approach is hard to grasp for less technical users and also rather error prone.

These are the main reasons for us to brew our own solution.

Features:

TAO Scheduled change is a really small plugin. It only does one thing, but tries to do this the right way: Take a copy of an arbitrary post/page/cpt, change it and make it replace the original post at a given date and time in the future.

Development:

This is just a little side project I am maintaining as time permits. If you find bugs or want to help in any capacity please visit the github repo:
tao-software/tao-schedule-update

1. Upload the plugin folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
3. No 3rd step neccessary

1. 

   The Plugin in Action

1.15

• fix timezone issue in datepicker (thanks to joaquinjsb)
• add spanish translation (thanks to Manuel5cc and Julian Castro)
• fix typo in english text

1.14.01

• hotfix date warning

1.14

• fix date formatting in datepicker
• php7.2 compatibility (removed create_function)
• expand TAO_ScheduleUpdate\create_publishing_post action to also include the original post’s ID
• add TAO_ScheduleUpdate\before_publish_post action
• add TAO_ScheduleUpdate\publish_post_date filter
• Fix error message in admin backend not working properly (thanks to LeniM)

1.13

• fix posts not being publicly visible when options flag was set

1.12

• fix timepicker stylesheet issue on https

1.11

• fix display of date in listview

1.10

• fix publishing fail

1.09

• added options page
• added recursive scheduling (enable this via the options page)
• code cleanup, unified comment styles, code formatting

1.08

• fix issue where releasedate would not display for post types that do not support authorship
• fix issue where other plugins register posttypes after tao-schedule-update initializes

1.07

• fix issue where gmt post dates where not updated correctly (thanks to CheeseDurger)

1.06

• add action TAO_ScheduleUpdate\create_publishing_post (thanks to ollietreend)
• add Japanese language files (thanks to yokotak0527)

1.05

• fix bug where kses filters would run on automatically published posts
• add check for empty array in copy_meta_and_terms function.

1.04.01

• fix bug where publishing a post overrides other content
• fix potential breakeage when cloning a post without meta infos

1.04

• directly go to edit screen after creating a scheduled post
• terms are now also copied over to the new post
• fixed bug where multiple meta keys with the same name were not correctly copied back to the original post
• removed possibility to schedule updates for posts in trash

1.03

• TAO_ScheduleUpdate::create_publishing_post now returns the created posts’s ID

1.02.01

• fix scheduled posts appearing in search
• fix problems with l10n textdomain

1.02

• PHP 5.3 Support

1.01

• Readme update

1.0

• The Initial Release