Cron+scheduler Are Finally Working UPDATEs

Scheduled Transitions is a Drupal module that allows me to tell cron, when it fires, to change the status of a post from “draft” to “published.”

Cron should fire on the hour. I am setting Scheduled Transitions to 3:45 so there is leeway. I am allowing Scheduled Transitions pick the latest draft and fire that. Drupal understands the time now to be 3:09.

UPDATE With this here update, I have forced a second revision to see if Scheduled Transitions picks the latest draft, as it claims it will.

UPDATE All is well (read bottom to top):

I had tried some fancy cron syntax in Ultimate Cron, and I’m guessing cron barfed. So I reverted to plain vanilla syntax, and Scheduled Transitions worked, presumably because cron’s stomach recovered.

So let’s hope that’s the last of cron job issues!

UPDATE While I was at it, Reports could not be scheduled because they were not subject to moderation, unlike all the other content types except blogroll. As it turns out, some reports need to be scheduled and front-paged, so I enabled the draft-to-published transition in Content Moderation’s configuration. Now reports can be scheduled.

UPDATE Not so fast? Read table from bottom to top:

“Is DOGE really dead?” published prematurely. I had intended it to publish on Monday May 18 at 6:45am. Instead, it published Sunday May 17 at 6:00pm. But I am wondering if this is pilot error. The log shows that the post published on the first available cron job, so I’m wondering if I got the day wrong. Another post, scheduled for 6:45am Tuesday May 19 did not publish (correctly) in the same cron run.

NOTE In fact, I scheduled a Goodnight Moon for the wrong day. It did not, correctly, publish, and so pilot error cannot be ruled out a priori.

UPDATE Scheduled Transitions does not update the “Published On” date and time on the post. This screws up the front page, which sorts on “Published On.” Therefore, post authors must update the “Published On” date and time to match the Scheduled Transition. Dates in the future are not an issue (nor are dates in the past, which makes this module preferable to Scheduler, in my mind, since Scheduler won’t allow rearranging front page posts by setting dates in the past).

In an abundance of caution, I disabled Ultimate Cron. Now all cron jobs run at the same time, every hour on the hour, using the system crontab. This was probably overkill on my part; we don’t have enough load on cron to worry about right now.