WordPress 2.9 scheduling, trackback error fix

If anyone has upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and experiencing the following weird behavior:

• Trackbacks not working
• Scheduled posts not posting and reporting “missed schedule”

Then you likely have one of these three errors:

• Could not be converted to UTF-8 / WordPress should cache failed feed fetches so as to avoid overloading feed sources
• Fatal error: Call to undefined method WP_Error::__destruct()
• Cron stopped working with standard configuration

There’s three patches that can be easily applied to fix your hair pulling issues in a jiffy.  You can find them over at Semi-Logical under the post: WP 2.9 three bugs, and how to fix them.

You may also find fixes at this wordpress.org/forums support post.  Ther are three or more pages of discussions and justifiable complaints but the fixes are there:  2.9 Schedule Posts “missed”

The errors were frustrating, no question about that.  But, the wordpress community responded amazingly.  The problem happened and in 24 hours there was a fix.  Here at Beck’s Cafe we should have waited a bit till WP 2.9.1 to upgrade but we upgraded the cafe to 2.9; lesson learned on first run software.   WordPress is open source software, free to download, has a great support community and rocks as a CMS for developing web sites and for blogs.  But, as open source, sometimes things get through the development community that shouldn’t.  None-the-less, it’s a testimony to the commitment by the wordpress community that things have been tidied up as fast as they have.   Now, I definitely need a second cup of coffee