Advanced: RPC-ed Posts No Longer Appearing (not updating wp_postmeta?)

Posted on this nearly a week ago; never got a response. I’ve done a bit more digging, so am trying again…

**Original Note:**

I have a perl script (using the WordPress::XMLRPC module) that posts to WP every day via a cron job. For months, it has worked well.

Starting in the last few days (after a couple of plug-in updates, including WPML Multilingual CMS, and perhaps some changes on my server host?), however, there’s been a new development.

The script does a new post and publishes it. It returns a post ID (for our example, let’s say it’s 2468). But it doesn’t appear on the blog.

So I then go into the admin interface via the web, go to Edit Posts, and the new post isn’t on the list. I click on one that is (which takes me to, for instance, wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=1234), and then change the URL to wp-admin/post.php?action=edit&post=2468 — just changing the post number to the missing post.

Magically, it appears, and is published. I don’t have to click anything on the form, I don’t have to click Preview. Nothing. The act of just bringing it up with post.php publishes it, apparently.

On the edit page, it shows as published with a published time of when the cronjob ran. Visibility is set to Public. All the indications are that it was done successfully overnight. It just never appeared.

**New Info:**

I dug into the database tables a bit, and it appears that when the post is ‘posted’ using RPC, it creates an _alp_processed metakey entry in wp_postmeta, and that’s it. When I go to the edit page (even if I don’t do any actual editing or click any buttons), it adds entries for an edit_last and an edit_lock. Other than that, I can’t find any differences between the two posts in wp_postmeta, wp_posts, or wp_term_relationships.

Could it be that the lack of an ‘edit_last’ or ‘edit_lock’ metadata entry for the post is preventing it from appearing? If so, why would that suddenly stop automatically happening? How might I fix it?

**New New Info:**

Okay, I tried manually inserting two rows into wp_postmeta for the ‘edit_last’ and ‘edit_lock’ data and it didn’t cause the post to appear (even on the “Posts” list in the admin interface). So I’m back to being completely stumped.

As ever, I’d appreciate any thoughts or responses; if for no other reason than to know I’m not talking to myself!

Thank you!