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December 1st, 2009
This one’s pretty tricky. If you’ve ever tried to update a post using the wp_update_post function with drafts or pending posts, you might have noticed that the post_date argument is ignored, instead the current date/time comes up. The post_date argument works only for published posts or during the publishing process. I looked into the WordPress core code, the wp_update_post function has an additional argument called edit_date, which is not mentioned in the codex, so if you’re trying to update an existing post which is a draft or a pending one, use the following method:
$post_data = array( "ID" => 123, "post_date" => $post_date, "edit_date" => true ); $post_id = wp_update_post($post_data);
This will update the post 123 and set it’s time to $post_date (which is in format Y-d-m H:i:s if you know what I mean ;). The other possible parameters for wp_update_post are described in the docs for wp_insert_post in the Codex.
Hi, Thanks for the great tip. Had been wondering why I was not able to set the dates to future when I manually schedule to publish in the future. Before I got your solution, I found that the date gets updated when you call wp_update_post twice. I called them with a sleep(1) between them. No idea why it was updating when we do that. Thanks a lot again.
Best.
Hey Andy, you’re welcome. I’m glad you sorted it out.