PublishPress Future 3.0 is Now Available
The PublishPress Future plugin allows you to make automatic changes to posts. pages and other content types.
On a date you choose, PublishPress Future can delete your post, change the status, or update the post categories, or make other changes.
We've just released version 3.0 of Future. This version of the plugin is a major change so I'm going to give an explanation of what's new in 3.0 and why we made these changes.
The problem we're fixing
Here at PublishPress we currently provide 9 different plugins. All of the plugins are built for publishers, and have related features.
Several PublishPress plugins enable you to schedule actions on your site. Here are some of those plugins:
- PublishPress Future allows you to schedule changes to posts. These include changing the status of a post, deleting a post, adding taxonomy terms, removing taxonomy terms, and more.
- PublishPress Revisions allows you to schedule changes to post content. You can create a copy of a post and schedule when the updated version goes live.
- PublishPress Planner allows you to send notifications to users about content changes. These notifications are often scheduled on a short delay to avoid stress on your server.
So our plugins need to provide you with accurate scheduling, but it's really difficult! WordPress does have a system called “WP Cron” that can schedule actions. But it's vulnerable to problems with servers, caching systems, and more.
We want to provide you with accurate scheduling, but now realize that we can't rely on the WordPress core.
The solution is Action Scheduler
WooCommerce is an enormously popular eCommerce platform and when you're dealing with millions of dollars of orders, it's vital to make sure that the right action happens at the right time. For example, if you're selling subscriptions with WooCommerce, you really need the renewals to happen accurately every month or every year.
The WooCommerce team realized they couldn't rely on the WordPress core either, so they built a codebase called Action Scheduler.
Every month, Action Scheduler processes millions of payments for the WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin, webhooks for WooCommerce, as well as emails and other events for a range of other plugins.
Plugins that use Action Scheduler include some of the biggest plugins in WordPress, including Give WP, All in One SEO, The Events Calendar, MailPoet, Rank Math SEO, and more.
Action Scheduler is the solution we plan to use to make the PublishPress plugins more reliable.
What's new in PublishPress Future 3.0?
In Future 3.0, you'll see a new “Future Actions” area. This is built with the Action Scheduler codebase.
This release makes scheduling more reliable. Plus, as an added bonus, you will see a log of everything that has happened and will happen.
This “Future Actions” table will give you an overview of changes to your site. Also, you can click “View log” to dive deeper for more details on any event. I've included an example in this screenshot below.
If you install the new PublishPress Future plugin on an existing site, the plugin will migrate any scheduled changes to the new system.
Please note that we have clarified the names of the different actions. When you add an action to a post, this screenshot shows the new choices:
Summary
Thanks for using the PublishPress plugins. The Action Scheduler codebase will be added to PublishPress Revisions and PublishPress Planner also. Together, we can make these plugins as reliable as possible for your projects.
