Publish – Bug or Feature?

weird. publish is there always ime…

Went back to March 23 version of edit-form-advanced.php which took care of the problem. Will do a compare later, I’m wordpressed out for awhile!

Looks like they added a conditional statement maybe to hide the publish button if “post status” is not set to “publish”, but it doesn’t work right, in my installation, anyhow. If you’re using the March 30 version of edit-form-advanced.php and not having this problem, then I think the process of debugging starts to look very daunting, indeed.

This is precicely why the devs stress that nightlies and CVS should NOT be used for production sites, and is only recommended for testing. Also as a point of order, you never specified what version of WP our were using.
TG

Fixed in CVS.

@techgnome: I didn’t realize anybody might use a March 30 CVS file for anything besides 1.2 alpha. Nor did I realize that there was more than one beta release to which this “Beta Discussion” section applied. My apologies. And I guess some people might think “go live” is synonymous with production site, but to me it means being internet accessible via URI as opposed to just running on my localhost PC accessible only to me. My apologies for misleading anyone.
I was going to ask whether you might be able to help, despite my shortcomings, but I see that Alex was nevertheless able to get straight to the problem. Developers like these are why, after a month of experimenting with CMS’s, and narrowing things down to WordPress and TextPattern (which is making great strides lately), WordPress is the one I’m “going live” with in the hopes that my testers will confirm my opinion that it’s worthy of a production site.
@alex: Thank you! I’m going to have a look as soon as I’m done here. Trying to follow along when y’all make fixes like that is teaching me a lot.

Hmm, better but still funky. Writing a new article and publishing works fine. To edit, the article opens in edit screen with no publish button visible. Choices are “save & continue” or “save’. If I hit “save & continue” the screen is refreshed to show the preview and the “publish” button appears and I can publish. But, if I hit “save” then the article goes into limbo and does not display in “view site”, even though the status button for “publish” was selected. Have to go and find it in the list of articles and click on “edit”, and when it loads into the edit screen none of the radio buttons are selected, but the “publish” button is visible and when clicked publishes the article, even though no new editing is done. The end result seems to be you have to “save & continue editing” before you can “publish”. Perhaps this is intentional? If so, I’d suggest also hiding the “save” button, and maybe change the label from “save and continue” to “preview and continue”.

Publish is only supposed to show up if the post has not yet been published. If if has already been published, it doesn’t need to be published again, only the changes need to be saved. Hence the button behavior.
This works as expected in my sandbox.

In my sandbox, hitting the “save” button after editing an already published article seems to clear the “post status”, giving it I guess a null value. Anyhow, it un-publishes the article. Go back to the edit screen, select the article for editing, and it comes up with the “post status” radio buttons all cleared. The edit was saved, though. At this point the “publish” button is visible (as it should according to what you’re saying). I can leave the “post status” radio buttons clear, or tick the “publish” status, either way I have to hit the “publish” button in order for the article to show up on the blog. Ticking the “publish” radio button and then clicking the “save” button doesn’t do it, it remains unpublished.
This is a 1.2 install with the latest CVS files. Could there be something left over in the db from the old discarded options of previous versions that’s running interference? BTW, I’m running Apache 1.3.27 (win32) with php 4.2.3. Unless you have another suggestion, I’m inclined to see what happens if I start over with a new database.

Specifically: in my db, a published article contains the value “publish” (without the quotes) in post_status field of wp_posts table. When I retrieve that article in the edit screen and click the “save” button (with or without actually editing anything), and then look at the db, the post_status field is now empty. Something in, I presume, post.php is changing $post_status from ‘publish’ to ‘ ‘, even though the radio button remains ticked for “publish”. Unfortunately, my limited php abilities leave me unable to figure out why, despite my best efforts. <sigh>

Well, I think I found the problem.
Here’s what post.php says at lines 304 and 306:
304 if (empty($comment_status)) $post_status =
get_settings(‘default_comment_status’);
306 if (empty($ping_status)) $post_status =
get_settings(‘default_ping_status’);
But here’s what it should say, I assume:
304 if (empty($comment_status)) $comment_status =
get_settings(‘default_comment_status’);
306 if (empty($ping_status)) $ping_status =
get_settings(‘default_ping_status’);
It fixes my problem, anyway. Looks like it’s been that way a long time. In the past, I always just hit the “publish” button, anyway, so it didn’t matter. When they made the “publish” button invisible if the article was already “published”, I had to use the “save” button and that’s when a previously latent problem became manifest. I guess most people default to “ping”, so nobody else noticed. Or, I don’t know, I’m very amateur at php, maybe there’s some other reason it works for me now. But it works. I feel better.

Fixed in CVS, thanks for keeping at it til you found the solution!

All in a day’s work. And half a night. Hmm, wonder what this note says that my wife left on her way out the door…