Make future posts visible to the public—not just within WP_Query

Question

I know I can publicly show future posts in a loop using 'post_status' => 'future' in WP_Query. But clicking on a future post's permalink will result in a 404 if you are not a logged-in user.

Suppose I have a post called Apocalypse in the post_type 'event', scheduled for 12-12-2099. The permalink is mysite.com/event/apocalypse. Is it possible to make mysite.com/event/apocalypse and other future 'event' posts visitable now by the public?

Ideally I'd be able to restrict future post availability to the 'event' post type, but I would settle for a solution that makes all future posts available regardless of post_type.

Answer 1

I would like to give my answer all this time later. In the case of making all the 'future' posts for the 'events' post type visible to the public, I found this solution:

add_filter('get_post_status', function($post_status, $post) {
    if ($post->post_type == 'events' && $post_status == 'future') {
        return "publish";
    }
    return $post_status;
}, 10, 2);

Answer 2

In short, you can make future posts visible by telling Wordpress to mark them as 'published' instead of 'scheduled'. You do this by using a future_post hook, which gets called when a post changes status. Each post type automatically gets its own future hook; since the custom post type I'm using is event, I can use the future_event hook. Here is the code:

function setup_future_hook() {
// Replace native future_post function with replacement
    remove_action('future_event','_future_post_hook');
    add_action('future_event','publish_future_post_now');
}

function publish_future_post_now($id) {
// Set new post's post_status to "publish" rather than "future."
    wp_publish_post($id);
}

add_action('init', 'setup_future_hook');

This solution came from this SE question: Marking future dated post as published

A caveat with this approach

The caveat I will add is that this makes it more difficult to get a loop of just future posts. Before, I could simply use 'post_status' => 'future'; but now, since we've set future posts' post_status to published, that doesn't work.

To get around this you can use a posts_where filter on your loop (for example, see the date range examples on the codex here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Time_Parameters), or you can compare the current date to the post date, something like this:

    // get the event time
    $event_time = get_the_time('U', $post->ID);

    // get the current time
    $server_time = date('U');

    // if the event time is older than (less than)
    // the current time, do something
    if ( $server_time > $event_time ){
       // do something
    }

However, neither of these techniques is as easy as having a separate post_status for future posts. Perhaps a custom post_status would be a good solution here.

Answer 3

For me the given snippet didn't worked, there were some errors in the post-edit.php, but I guess that $postatt is now null in 4.6.1.

Anyways that's the final solution that worked for me like a charm.

add_filter('the_posts', 'show_all_future_posts');

function show_all_future_posts($posts)
{
   global $wp_query, $wpdb;

   if(is_single() && $wp_query->post_count == 0)
   {
      $posts = $wpdb->get_results($wp_query->request);
   }

   return $posts;
}

Answer 4

I forced the publish status from functions.php of a child theme

global $wpdb;
$wpdb->query("update ".$wpdb->prefix."posts set post_status='publish' where post_status='future' and post_type in ('post','customposttype1','customposttype2')");

Answer 5

I will add my solution to this issue; which seems to be cleaner in the aspect that you can still have a future status ( and not force publish status to all your posts:

1. we raise $wp_query_event a flag when we detect that we are on single post and it is the post type we wish to enable it. ( we break function otherwise )

2. we keep set the $post on the WP_Query so we will have the proper $queried_object to any other future reference

3. if the lateset queried object is of our type ( using the previous flag we raised ) and the post is of the future status, assigned it as our posts result.

The code:

$wp_query_event = false;
add_filter( 'posts_results', function( $posts, $wp_query ) {
    global $wp_query_event;
    if ( !$wp_query->is_main_query() || !$wp_query->is_single || !isset( $wp_query->query_vars[ 'event' ] ) ) return( $posts );
    $wp_query->post = $posts[ 0 ];
    $wp_query_event = true;
    return( $posts );
}, 50, 2 );

add_filter( 'the_posts', function( $posts, $wp_query ) {
    global $wp_query_event;
    if ( !$wp_query_event ) return( $posts );
    $wp_query_event = false;
    if ( !empty( $posts ) ) return( $posts );
    $post = $wp_query->get_queried_object();        
    if ( in_array( $post->post_status, [ 'future' ] ) ) {
        $posts = [ $post ];
    } else {
        $wp_query->post = null;
    }
    return( $posts );
}, 50, 2 );