Publisher 3.7.6 plans content before a publication slot, reserves each approved article to one slot and uses WordPress’s native Scheduled-post mechanism for the normal auto-publish path. A separate Publisher event remains as a watchdog.
Safety rule
A schedule never overrides a quality blocker, licence lock, pause, disabled workflow or missing approved topic. Automatic publication requires an automation-ready article and a valid slot.
Configure the schedule
Open Publisher → Schedule.
| Field | Values/behaviour |
|---|---|
| Enable schedule | Off by default; saves the active planning policy |
| Cadence | Daily, selected weekdays, every N days or weekly selected days |
| First date | Earliest active schedule date |
| Publication times | Up to 12 unique HH:MM values in WordPress site timezone |
| Posts per time | 1–10 articles for a slot |
| Maximum per day | Safety cap; cannot be lower than configured slot capacity |
| Generate in advance | 1–168 hours before the slot; default 24 |
| Workflow | Auto publish, Pending review or Draft-only generation |
| Missed slot | Use next ready or Skip |
| Pause | Stops new runtime scheduling and safely holds native schedules |
Verify Settings → General → Timezone in WordPress before saving. Do not calculate schedule times from the administrator’s browser timezone.
Generation and reservation lifecycle
For each slot:
- Publisher calculates generation time as slot minus lead hours.
- It creates a durable planned ledger record.
- At generation time it checks licence, pause, daily cap and approved topics.
- It queues a checkpointed background job.
- A quality-approved Auto-publish result becomes automation-ready.
- The article is reserved to that exact slot and cannot be reused elsewhere.
- When the slot is more than 60 seconds away, Publisher sets the WordPress post to Scheduled (
future) with exact local and GMT dates. - WordPress publishes the future post at the target time.
- Publisher records the native transition and marks the ledger Published.
The durable states include planned, queued, generating, generated, ready, scheduled, review, publishing, published, skipped, failed and cancelled. Generated, Scheduled and Published timestamps remain available in history.
Publisher watchdog
Publisher schedules an independent publication event for the same slot. Normally it observes that WordPress already published the reserved article and records success. If WordPress misses the native future-post event, the watchdog verifies the slot and can publish an eligible reserved/ready article safely.
The watchdog is recovery—not a second normal publication path. Exclusive reservation and published-slot metadata prevent one article from being used by another slot.
Review and Draft workflows
- Pending review: completed content waits in Pending status for an editor; no automatic future schedule remains.
- Draft-only: completed content remains Draft and is not automatically scheduled.
- Auto publish: only quality-approved automation-ready content is converted to a native Scheduled post.
Topic Review mode decides whether a topic needs approval before generation. Schedule workflow decides the resulting post path. Publisher does not expose a separate brief-approval screen.
Pause, disable and workflow changes
When the schedule is paused/disabled or workflow changes away from Auto publish, Publisher 3.7.6 removes its native future schedules safely:
- Review converts the article to Pending and records Review.
- Draft-only converts it to Draft and records Generated.
- Paused Auto publish converts it to Draft but preserves it as Ready/reserved for later recovery.
Generated content and history are not deleted.
Generate the first article now
Use this one-time action only after the schedule, approved topics, providers and Draft tests are ready. It queues the first upcoming uncommitted slot immediately; it does not allow a duplicate job for a slot that is already queued, ready, scheduled or published.
Recommended rollout
- Prove several manual Draft jobs.
- Verify Action Scheduler/WP-Cron reliability.
- Configure one daily future slot and 24-hour lead.
- Run Pending review or Draft-only for a week.
- Test pause/resume and missed-slot policy.
- Enable Auto publish for one future slot.
- Confirm the post appears under WordPress Posts as Scheduled with the exact intended time.
- Confirm WordPress publication and Publisher history agree.
- Add more times only when provider limits and editorial capacity support them.
Cron
Publisher uses Action Scheduler when available and otherwise WP-Cron. Low-traffic sites can delay WP-Cron, including WordPress future posts. A host-level cron that calls WordPress cron regularly is more predictable.
Troubleshooting
- No slot: verify schedule enabled, first date, cadence, weekday and at least one time.
- Generation late: inspect cron/Action Scheduler and lead hours.
- No approved topic: approve/queue a non-conflicting topic.
- Ready but not Scheduled: confirm Auto publish, unpaused schedule, future slot and quality-ready metadata.
- Scheduled time wrong: verify WordPress timezone and stored post date/GMT date.
- Same article appears in two slots: stop automation and collect history/meta evidence; 3.7.6 reservation should prevent this.
- Native post missed publication: inspect
publish_future_post/WP-Cron and the watchdog history message. - Pause seems ignored: a provider request already in progress may finish; pause prevents new runtime work and reconciles native schedules safely.
- Slot skipped: history should say licence, daily cap, missing topic or no quality-approved draft.
Verification checklist
- Times are in WordPress site timezone.
- Daily cap covers intended slot capacity only.
- Lead time is sufficient for long content and images.
- Every article is reserved to one slot.
- Auto-publish articles appear as native Scheduled posts before publication.
- WordPress and Publisher history reach the same Published result.
- Pause/Review/Draft-only removes future schedules without deleting content.