Validating custom meta boxes with jQuery results in posts being saved as draft instead of published post

Question

I have a custom post type with a bunch of custom fields. I want to validate the meta box input with jQuery as soon as you press the Publish button. Here's what I have (I left out all my validation stuff):

$("input#publish").click(function(e){
    e.preventDefault();
    $("#ajax-loading").show();
    $('form#post').submit();
});

As you can see I am only interrupting the form submit at this point, nothing else going on. However, posts are now saved as drafts only and I can not manually set them to published (I have administrator priviliges). As soon as I remove above code, all is back to normal.

Is there any way to get this type of client side validation working properly without using plugins? I'm on Wordpress 3.6.1.

Answer 1

So here's what I ended up doing: I hide the publish button, replace it with my own publish button (one that does not submit the form) and when you click that button the validation script is executed. When there are no errors, a click event is registered on the original publish button. That way, no more drafts and problem solved.

Answer 2

I was having the same problem.

Do not use e.preventDefault();

simple return false or true at the end of your Javascript.