Scheduling WordPress Posts.
To be honest, not much can go wrong. It’s an easy procedure, practically foolproof.
(First, find your fool.)
The Process. . .
1 . Review until you never want to read it again.
2 . On your Draft screen, the Settings sidebar should be showing. If it isn’t, click on that universal icon for Settings: the little cog on the right of the top bar.
3 . If Block (top of the sidebar) is underlined in blue, click on Document, to the left of it.
4 . Assign your post’s Categories and Tags if you haven’t already.
5 . Save Draft.
6 . DO NOT click on Publish. Instead, find the blue link that says Immediately. (Fear not – it lies. WordPress won’t actually publish immediately; a calendar will appear.)
7 . Change the time of publication (if you want to) before choosing your date from the calendar, because once you click on a date, the calendar will close. You can still change time or date by clicking on them again, but your time is precious. (Yes – I went on those Time Management courses once upon a time. My time now is more precious than paid working hours ever were.)
8 . Click on Schedule. WordPress will then ask you to click Schedule again to confirm. If, at any time, you are asked whether you really want to leave, beware. This means you have forgotten to Save or to confirm your last action and you risk losing changes.
9 . You are still not committed (assuming you have not made the error described below). Re-edit your scheduled post at any time by opening it, making your changes, and clicking on Schedule again.
Let’s go back to point 8.
Before you click on that button at the top of the column, read it to make sure you know what you are clicking.
If it in fact reads Publish instead of Schedule, DO NOT click on it.
You have probably forgotten to change the month, and have selected a date which has already passed. When you click on Publish, WordPress will not warn you of your error; this time it will publish immediately. (I speak from experience here.)
If you really don’t want your post out there yet, the only thing you can then do is go back to your list of posts and Trash it (3-dot menu to the right of posts’s picture) but the email to alert your Followers to your post will already have gone out.
You can reinstate this post from Trash, but it will reappear on your blog; you don’t have the option to send it back to Drafts. (I tried it with this post just to check my assumption was correct. It is.)
Your only other options are to re-draft it from scratch, or to leave it in Trash until you want to publish and reinstate it on that day.
To Sum up…
Beware the three gremlins. . .
Your biggest enemy is Familiarity (aka Overconfidence). If you read what you are about to activate, all should be well.
The next pitfall is Haste. Never let that Nearly Finished thought enter your head when you want to be somewhere else. (I equate this to the times – note that plural – when, driving late at night, I’ve thought, Nearly Home, just before I woke up on hitting the kerb.)
Do not drive, schedule or publish when Tired.
Writing Wrinkles, and Random Ramblings 
I have actually managed this successfully but with the old system I haven’t tried it on the block set up yet.
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I never tried it the old way; Pond People was my first foray into scheduling. I now have episodes scheduled until mid-April. (Heaven knows what I’ll write about after that…)
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What freedom! You have scheduled a blogging holiday, sort of.
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…except that I feel obliged to post something else between, in case those not interested in reading The Pond People get in the habit of deleting my blog alert emails. 😦
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I wouldn’t 🙂
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I have been using scheduling for years now, and like you Cathy have posts scheduled up to mid April. But, WordPress on an iPad is just awful with media not being uploaded, paragraphs disappearing, the screen occasionally “juddering” and many other glitches. I’ve given up with it and write draft posts in Scrivener on my iPad. Then post on my Mac! Crazy!
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I’m afraid my equipment doesn’t include anything Apple (although my media-savvy daughter has always gone for Mac and i-phone) but I have been dragged into the century of the fruitbat lately with a new smartphone after Microsoft stopped supporting the old Lumia and a new laptop after I tipped a glass of wine over the old Acer.
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I think that the same issues might apply to android smartphone and Microsoft laptop with the latter being more stable than an android tablet. But I’m guessing.
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I confess to not using my phone (which is android) for much browsing. I prefer a bigger screen. I don’t even use my surface as a tablet often because I prefer a keyboard and ‘proper’ mouse. I was impressed though by the Kindle reproduction of my e-book on my phone (the Christmas one with pictures). WordPress can’t match that so far with its AMP.
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I’ve been writing a book about Nepal for some time now and will eventually try to publish on kindle as an ebook too
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Good luck with your project
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🙏🙏
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regarding the third gremlin, how about after a couple of beers? 🙂
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Never got into beer but happy with my wine and Scotch (not often together). Since my present husband is ex-Met police I wouldn’t be allowed behind the wheel even within the statutory limit (and, anyway, he hates being a passenger and doesn’t drink 🙂 )
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Your husband sounds like the perfect companion when going out for the evening! 😀
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Indeed he is.
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🙂
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Such a useful post for other bloggers, Cathy. I appreciate the scheduling facility when I do 2or 3 cat thinkies at once.
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I love your sense of humor, Cathy. “Do not drive, schedule or publish when Tired.” I can’t tell you how many accidents I’ve had with publishing too soon. Most times the glaring error is in huge print in the title or in the first paragraph. I also found out that if you edit out the error, it makes not difference if someone clicks on the Facebook post, they get the wrong version. Very humiliating. 🙂
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I tended to catch mine when the full email had gone out to followers – with the error in there. 😦
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LOL Maybe that’s why I haven’t done much with emails. That’s really not my strong point.
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These go out automatically from WP to Followers when a post is published – I don’t think I have enough to say to fill an emailed newsletter.
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Oh, I never quite got that. I press follow when someone follows me after I check out their blog, but I don’t usually check the email box on their site. I keep a Google Doc. journal and record blogs I visit so I can find them again.
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When I follow I don’t automatically get email alerts any more – my inbox got unmanageable. I find the Reader useful on WP and go through that every morning to see if there are any blogs I follow that have new posts I want to read.
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Yes, that is what I like as well. I delete most of my emails because I get 50 -60 at a time, mostly commercial.
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