FuturePost
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+
Contributions / improvements welcome!
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!
April 14th, 2008 at 11:57 pmAbsolutely – 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.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:07 amoooh 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.
April 17th, 2008 at 6:27 pmI 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.
April 19th, 2008 at 12:15 pmThanks Dave! Beautiful theme you’ve got there on ri.aiga.org.
April 23rd, 2008 at 1:28 amGreat 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!
May 1st, 2008 at 10:18 amRatsi – 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.
May 1st, 2008 at 10:39 amhi 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
May 10th, 2008 at 9:22 ambaron – See comments above – the plugin does not alter the admin interface and therefore is perfectly compatible with 2.5.x.
May 14th, 2008 at 4:48 pmScott,
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,
May 25th, 2008 at 2:34 pmDan
Sorry for the multiple posts but I figured out what was wrong.
May 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pmThe URL that is currently pointing to the file is
http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/the-future-is-now.zip
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.
May 25th, 2008 at 2:43 pmWell, 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
June 2nd, 2008 at 9:54 amThis plugin seriously just made my day! Thank you so much for creating and maintaining this!
June 5th, 2008 at 7:53 pmthanks 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…
June 8th, 2008 at 9:38 ambaga – 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).
June 8th, 2008 at 9:54 amHello,
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
June 12th, 2008 at 11:11 pmIvan – 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.
June 12th, 2008 at 11:38 pmI 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?
June 25th, 2008 at 1:52 amoops, 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!
June 25th, 2008 at 1:56 amMP – 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.
June 25th, 2008 at 8:23 amthanks for the plugin, before this had to modify some WP sources by hand !
anyone knows if works with WP 2.6 ?
July 24th, 2008 at 2:31 pmhi 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!
July 25th, 2008 at 1:47 amIs there a recommended way for querying future posts in WordPress? Or do I have to drop down and write the query myself?
Thanks.
August 8th, 2008 at 2:48 pmDC – I could be wrong, but would expect you’d have to do a manual query for that.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:51 amHi. 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.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:08 amParthatel – 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.
August 17th, 2008 at 10:22 amI 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?
August 25th, 2008 at 2:39 pmSeagyn – Just use this plugin. Future posts will be properly published and your problem with anonymous users goes away.
August 25th, 2008 at 3:04 pmThe problem is that I do not want to publish all posts especially ones that are ‘really’ scheduled for the future.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:21 pmAh, 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.
August 25th, 2008 at 11:42 pmIf 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?
August 25th, 2008 at 11:57 pmSeagyn – 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.
August 26th, 2008 at 11:36 pmIts 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.
August 27th, 2008 at 6:45 amJust curious, is this compatible with 2.6.x too?
September 27th, 2008 at 2:14 pmSarah (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.
September 28th, 2008 at 9:46 amI’ve updated the compatibility ranking on WP/Extend to specify 2.6.
September 28th, 2008 at 9:57 amOh my god… if that works I resolved every problem I had !!!
Thank you.
October 30th, 2008 at 4:27 pm“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
November 23rd, 2008 at 9:55 amdont work with 2.7 ….
December 16th, 2008 at 11:48 amdzqd: I just did a quick test, and FuturePost worked perfectly with 2.7. Can you tell me how it failed for you?
December 16th, 2008 at 12:45 pmWorked great before I upgraded to 2.7 It still posts the future post but doesn’t show the link on the calendar…
January 8th, 2009 at 1:17 pmAny ideals??
Used ‘musik’ fix from this post…
January 8th, 2009 at 1:25 pmhttp://wordpress.org/support/topic/181245
it’s working now.
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!
January 28th, 2009 at 8:57 am@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
February 15th, 2009 at 6:03 amThe 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?
June 29th, 2009 at 2:25 amDoes this plug work with 2.8? I have made many post but none will show on calendar in the future. Please advise
July 7th, 2009 at 8:50 pmchainsaw – 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.
July 7th, 2009 at 10:29 pmThe calander that lists posts
July 9th, 2009 at 11:30 amchainsaw – 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?
July 9th, 2009 at 12:17 pm[...] The Future is Now! I also would like to give thanks to Arnt Christian for his always constructive and inspiring feedback to the work on the site, for countless number of nightly conversations about open source and new ways of creating art together and for his commitment to the eyesee wiki. [...]
July 30th, 2009 at 5:45 pmHow do you reverse it so that the closer dates are listed first? I have events for sept – oct, but its listing them top to bottom from oct to sept. I want the Sept posts first. Any ideas?
September 21st, 2009 at 9:10 amJustin, that’s not a FuturePost question, but a standard WordPress loop question. You need to see the docs on ordering in the loop.
September 21st, 2009 at 4:56 pmHey there.
Did you ever find that hook to get round the 404 errors in single view? Sadly without this, I can’t use this plugin – yet it’s by far my favourite solution out of all the bloaty calendar plugins.
Please do let me know if you’ve worked something out. Seems like it’s impossible without hacking the core file.
September 21st, 2009 at 5:40 pmlew – Your comment is the first mention on this page of “404″ – I have no idea what you’re referring to!
September 21st, 2009 at 11:02 pmHi! I’ve installed Events Calendar plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/events-calendar/) and would love for the future posts to be visible. I’ve installed The Future Is Now for this reason, yet for some reason it’s not working. Any thoughts?
(The website: http://www.CounterPULSE.org)
October 3rd, 2009 at 9:51 amBTW, if this works, MAD KUDOS! We’ve been scheming how to post future events forever and a day.
Hi Scot,
Please disregard this and my earlier comment. Too much caffeine or I’m not sure what — I failed to see the helpful comment above by Ed, and by modifying the query.php, this made The Future is Now work. Awesome. Also
I believe that this is also the 404 issue mentioned above. Perhaps you could mention this in the installation process to avoid confusion? It worked for my project, and I’m very grateful for your plugin. Many thanks!
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/141099?replies=2
October 3rd, 2009 at 1:06 pmi was using this plugin with 2.8 version but i can’t get it to work on 2.9-rare.it doesn’t display the future events.
October 12th, 2009 at 2:52 amAdam – Sounds like an issue you should report to the WP developers. If it turns out something substantial really has changed with WP internals when 2.9 goes beta, I’ll fix the plugin.
October 12th, 2009 at 11:04 pm“Used ‘musik’ fix from this post…
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/181245
it’s working now.”
So did I, but it just removed all event-links in my calendar, both current, past and future.
Anyone have any ideas on how to show future posts in the default calendar widget?
November 18th, 2009 at 3:28 pmI just had a look at the ‘musik’ post to see whether his fix might be something I could integrate into the Future is Now plugin so that calendars are properly handled, but unfortunately that is one giant clusterbomb of code, not a simple/clean function that I can override from the context of a plugin. Sorry.
Sure makes me wish WordPress written in Django instead of PHP
November 18th, 2009 at 10:09 pmThanks for the great plugin. I have been using it I conjugation with Event Calendar (http://wpcal.firetree.net/). The combination does what I need. However I have run into an problem. We wanting to be able to have some post still scheduled for future dates. Is there a way to do this with this plugin?
November 30th, 2009 at 12:05 pmSteve – No, *scheduling* posts for future publication is the opposite of what FuturePost does. FuturePost overrides the future scheduling and does immediate posting instead.
December 1st, 2009 at 10:07 amThis is simply awesome. Adds just the functionality I need! Great job! 5 Stars
January 13th, 2010 at 12:13 amwhat about the past posts? Does the plugin hide the post when it gets old?
January 27th, 2010 at 6:13 amNiko – No. There are a bazillion ways to do that. That’s a radically different piece of functionality from what this does. Different use cases, different needs, different audience.
January 27th, 2010 at 9:34 amIs there a way to reverse the plugin? When I deactivate the plugin, I cannot set posts for future display.
March 9th, 2010 at 5:14 pmBill, what do you mean by “cannot set posts for future display?” You deactivate the plugin, create a new post timestamped in the future… and then what happens?
March 9th, 2010 at 10:01 pm@Shacker,
March 17th, 2010 at 12:41 amI think that what Niko is asking has to do with this plugin, because when a event is history I would like to have it gone of my events list. Otherwise people could think it is still a event that has to come.
Kaj, Nico – Ah, I’m with you now. No, this plugin has absolutely nothing to do with what happens to past posts, nor do I think it should. You’ll need to look elsewhere for that kind of functionality. Or just set a custom query before the loop.
March 18th, 2010 at 8:40 amI love this plugin, but have been looking for years for a way to have future posts show up in the blog but not in the RSS feed. I have a section of my site where I post future events — and this plugin works great to show those future events. But, I really don’t want these future events to show up in the RSS feed (now or ever, really).
Know of a way I can do this?
Cheers
May 18th, 2010 at 7:44 pmWill
Will – No, this plugin won’t do that, sorry. You’d have to use something much more sophisticated than this 3-liner to get that kind of functionality. One thing you could do would be to categorize posts in a certain way, then override the query that generates the RSS so that it doesn’t pick up those posts.
Custom RSS in WP
May 18th, 2010 at 8:09 pmGood suggestion. The posts I want to exclude from the RSS are in a distinct category of their own. I’ll explore that idea. But, I prefer to leave wordpress php unmodified. It keeps upgrades much simpler.
May 19th, 2010 at 10:23 amWorks also in WP 3.0, thanks for this simple but great plugin!
July 2nd, 2010 at 3:22 amUsing the plug-in with WP 3.0, works fine, however…
I’m trying to get future posts to show up in a widget / the sidebar (working), but I’d like the future posts to still be gone from the main loop. Is there a snippet of php that I could easily add which would accomplish this, keeping the Future Is Now plugin for the sidebar? Gracias…
July 22nd, 2010 at 7:52 amZeke – For that you’ll want to create your own custom query for the main loop, filtering out posts newer than the current date and time. I’m sure you can find examples of this in the codex or google (just search for “wordpress custom query date”).
July 22nd, 2010 at 9:01 amAny possibility of adding an option in the write panel so you can do this per post, rather than for every scheduled post? Or like suggested above, being able to specify specific categories for this to work on.
Anyhow, great plugin! Adding these options would make it even greater!
July 26th, 2010 at 6:00 pmaaronp – This plugin has no interface, and building one would be a whole different ball game. If anyone wants to tackle that, please fork this plugin and go for it. Honestly I’m just not that interested in working with PHP to undertake something like that. This plugin is a simple two-liner, and that probably won’t change. Sorry.
July 27th, 2010 at 8:59 amThe plugin works great for regular posts, but it doesn’t seem to modify custom post types. I have a custom post type called “Events.” But even after activating the plugin I can’t ‘publish’ future ‘Events.’ They remain ‘scheduled’ just as before.
Any idea of what I could change in future-post.php to change this?
November 7th, 2010 at 10:10 amhow do i donate… i love your plugin! saved me soooo much work.
January 27th, 2011 at 7:15 pmDonations cheerfully NOT accepted!
Glad it saved you some time
January 28th, 2011 at 6:57 pmHas anyone figured out a fix for custom post types?
I rely heavily on this plugin for almost all of the sites I build, but I need to be able to use custom post types!
Any advice/guidance is greatly appreciated.
Thx
January 29th, 2011 at 2:06 pmAn update for all of you re: Custom Post Types:
From WP Core: Line 884 of wp-includes/posts.php
add_action( ‘future_’ . $post_type, ‘_future_post_hook’, 5, 2 );
I tried just adding the ” .$post_type ” to the plugin to make the “_post”dynamic, but that did not work.
However, if you are ONLY using this plugin for ONE custom post type, you can manually replace the “post” with the name of your custom post type and the plugin WILL publish your future posts! Not a long-term fix, but it will work for now…
Here’s my working code for a type called “seminar”
add_action(‘future_seminar’, ‘publish_future_post_now’, 5, 2 );
Best of luck to you all… and let me know if someone comes up with a “global” way of making this work for all post types!
January 29th, 2011 at 2:23 pmNice work FPF. I suspect this is going to have to be the general approach – update the plugin for each custom post type in your system.
January 30th, 2011 at 12:18 amThis plugin should have saved my life like many others but I use custom post types !
April 10th, 2011 at 10:07 amI tried to fix it the way FPF explained but it didn’t work for me…
Anyway, thanks for your work and the tips.
Thanks for the report Pierre. I’d really like to look into this but unfortunately just don’t have time. I will when I can, but if anyone comes up with a fix, please post the solution here and I’ll integrate.
April 10th, 2011 at 10:26 am@FPF, thanks!! Simple and efficient!
October 5th, 2011 at 8:38 pmMany thanks – i’ve got a loooong search to find that wonderful thing. Its so simple and works with the actual version of WordPress… really happy!!!
January 14th, 2012 at 6:48 pmJust wanted to let you all know that this plugin is the core of our website! I cannot imagine what we would do without it – now the date stamps of the posts and of our meetings/events are the same! No more confused users!
January 20th, 2012 at 2:43 pmWorks great with the latest version of WordPress Jan 2012 version.
January 20th, 2012 at 2:43 pmRight on PFLAG – glad to hear it’s served you well.
January 21st, 2012 at 1:59 amHi, I love the plugin, I´m doing an events website and it worked great, however now we added a custom post type “events” so we use the normal “posts” for blogging, the plugin seems to not have any effect on the custom post type, do you know how I could manage to get it working with this set up?
thanks in advance!
February 21st, 2012 at 11:41 pmI don’t do much WP work anymore, and haven’t tried it with custom post types. Can anyone help Pedro out here?
February 22nd, 2012 at 12:00 amI tried the FPF workaround, didn’t work though
I changed it to
add_action( ‘future_Eventos’, ‘_future_post_hook’, 5, 2 );
I turned on and off the plugin afterwards, but its bit odd because it still works on my normal posts, it just doesn’t do anything for my “events” custom post type
anyone have a clue?
also, the filename is post.php (FPF mentioned posts.php)
February 22nd, 2012 at 12:13 amand for me the line was not at Line 884, it was at 1036
Hope to see an answer to this last question !
February 23rd, 2012 at 11:31 amHi- I don’t know if anyone else has experienced this but I’m finding that Future Posts don’t work on Safari/iphone etc. Thoughts?
August 29th, 2012 at 4:01 pmAlex – Future Posts is not a Javascript plug and doesn’t do anything client side whatoever, so it’s not possible that there is any particular browser dependency related to this plugin. It only affects internal WP queries, not output.
August 29th, 2012 at 4:11 pmThanks for the fast reply. You’re right – now I realize it’s not working on any browsers, page was just stored in my cache on Chrome. So now i just need to troubleshoot why it’s not working. When i set a post to a future date is it supposed to say “Scheduled?” Here is my site: http://www.ps122.org/wp/
August 30th, 2012 at 8:20 amThanks!
I don’t see the word “scheduled” on your site – maybe only admin sees that. Regardless, that would be something your theme is doing – you need to edit your template(s) to make it stop. Not related to the plugin (read the source code of this plugin – it barely does anything).
August 30th, 2012 at 8:34 amThis plugin is no longer working for WordPress 3.5 updated 12/12/12
December 12th, 2012 at 9:25 amThanks for the report PFLAG – I’ll look into it.
December 12th, 2012 at 9:33 amAny news about plugin ? working on wp 3.5
Cheers
December 12th, 2012 at 6:54 pmIndeed, it does appear to be broken in 3.5. I’ll look into a fix, hopefully soon. Stay tuned.
December 13th, 2012 at 6:32 pmThe plugin has been updated to work with WP 3.5!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/the-future-is-now/
Many thanks Andrew Nacin.
December 14th, 2012 at 1:30 amThanks! You did that very fast!
December 14th, 2012 at 2:15 amThanks for the speedy update to fix latest WP version break
December 17th, 2012 at 11:16 amThanks for this. Anyone know how to get it working again for custom post types?
January 14th, 2013 at 6:37 amHi, this is a great plugin and it would be fantastic if it could work for custom post types. Anyone has any advice?
February 3rd, 2013 at 11:29 pmI was hoping to use this plug in to schedule my posts in the future, have it show up immediately (which is does) but not have the post show up in my archive until the publish date. Any advice on how I can do that? I don’t want it in my archive list until the date, but want the post page to show up. Thanks
April 15th, 2013 at 2:50 amBit of an unusual error.
I have a site in development with ‘The Future is Now!’ plugin running.
When you edit a post that has already been published, and choose to replace the featured image, it will remove / forget it once you have clicked ‘Update’ in the Publish panel.
It allows you to choose the Featured Image, but once you click that Update button it’s gone.
I have determined it is the plugin doing this, as when I disable this plugin the normal functionality restores.
Any clues?
thanks, Sam.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/the-future-is-now/
May 13th, 2013 at 2:53 amSam, I just did some testing, and cannot reproduce this problem. Nor can I imagine how any code in this tiny plugin would relate to anything in Featured Images in any way, shape or form. Absolutely unrelated, sorry.
May 13th, 2013 at 8:23 am