Movable Type Dumbness: Scheduled Posts

Movable Type allows you to schedule posts in advanced (for example, I’m writing this post Sunday night but it won’t publish until Tuesday afternoon). However, in order to get the scheduled post to “pop” live at the time you specify, there is script that you run from the server via crontab. It makes since that they won’t magically appear when you static publishing, since the Movable Type program actually creates each web page manually and stores them on the hard drive, content complete.

However, it also supports dynamic publishing, where the pages are created automagically by the program when they are accessed. This allows you to do stupid pet tricks, speeds up things like comment postings, and saves hard disk space on the server. It would make sense that, since the pages are created automatically as they are requested, that it would automatically publish the page that is past it’s scheduled date. But, it doesn’t. A scheduled post for today didn’t appear because when I switched to dynamic, I deleted the cronjob. It’s fixed now, but, it’s still dumb.

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