WP_Query() returning different results depending on browser

$query->post_count is 1 when accessing with FF, 0 with the other browsers (i.e., the db query succeeds with FF and fails with the other browsers).

Sorry, but the site isn’t public yet so I can’t provide a link.

The register_post_type() call is as follows:

function
create_post_types ()
{
	register_post_type ('my_custom_post_type',
		array (
			'labels' => array (
				'name' => __ ('My Name'),
				'singular_name' => __ ('My Name'),
				'all_items' => __ ('All My Names'),
				'add_new_item' => __ ('Add New My Name'),
				'edit_item' => __ ('Edit My Name'),
				'new_item' => __ ('New My Name'),
				'view_item' => __ ('View My Name'),
				'search_items' => __ ('Search My Names'),
				'not_found' => __ ('No my names found'),
				'not_found_in_trash' => __ ('No my names found in Trash')
				),
			'public' => false,
			'menu_position' => 5,
			'has_archive' => false,
			'supports' => array (
				'title', 'editor', 'author', 'revisions', 'page-attributes'
				),
			'show_ui' => true
			)
		) ;
}
add_action ('init', 'create_post_types') ;

And yes, there is one custom taxonomy used with this custom post type, as follows:

function
create_taxonomies ()
{
	$labels = array (
		'name' => _x ('My Name Types', 'taxonomy general name'),
		'singular_name' => _x ('My Name Type', 'taxonomy singular name'),
		'all_items' => __ ('All My Name Types'),
		'parent_item' => null,
		'parent_item_colon' => null,
		'edit_item' => __ ('Edit My Name Type'),
		'update_item' => __ ('Update My Name Type'),
		'add_new_item' => __ ('Add New My Name Type'),
		'new_item_name' => __ ('New My Name Type'),
		'add_or_remove_items' => __ ('Add or remove my name types'),
		'choose_from_most_used' => __ ('Choose from the most used my name types'),
		'menu_name' => __ ('My Name Types'),
		) ;

	register_taxonomy ('my_custom_post_type-type', 'my_custom_post_type', array (
		'hierarchical' => true,
		'labels' => $labels,
		'show_ui' => true,
		'update_count_callback' => '_update_post_term_count',
		'query_var' => true,
		)) ;

	return ;
}
add_action ('init', 'create_taxonomies', 0) ;

In case it helps, here are the relevant rows from the various wp tables (with irrelevant columns left out for brevity).

wp_posts

ID	post_author	post_date		post_title	post_status	post_name	post_type
12	18		2012-11-12 19:21:19	My title	pending		my-title	my_custom_post_type

wp_terms

term_id	name	slug
26	Name	name

wp_term_taxonomy

term_taxonomy_id	term_id	taxonomy
47			26	my_custom_post_type-type

wp_term_relationship

object_id	term_taxomomy_id	term_order
12		47			0

(hopefully, the above formatted correctly, without a “preview” I won’t know until I post this)

sorry, the above code is “sanitized” to remove references to my client’s name and I just messed up the sanitation. But since the theme I’m developing is just for this one client and I18N is not really necessary for them, I just went ahead and removed all __() and _x() just to see if somehow the translation could be the problem, but no such luck.

no caching plugins.

but, yes, I have been logged in while using FF and not the others (FF being my preferred browser…the others I use to check x-browser compat issues). And I just verified that if I log out of FF then the query fails and when I log in with Chrome the query succeeds! So, we’re closer to a solution, thanx!

What effect could that possibly have? I have no code wrapped in is_user_logged_in() and the only code I have wrapped in is_admin() creates custom meta boxes for this custom post type (and another custom meta box for post_type=’post’ that attaches the ID of one of these custom posts to a regular post).

@samuel: I understand that for the normal loop, pending posts aren’t included. But this is happening outside of the loop. My the args I’m passing to WP_Query() explicitly ask for posts with status ‘pending’. Can you point me to where this is documented?

Looking into the code of WP_Query()->get_posts(), I see that there is some code that checks is_user_logged_in() and current_user_can() while building certain queries. However, those code branches aren’t active in this case and the resulting $query->request that is being constructed is the same whether I’m logged in or not (see the 2nd code block in my OP). I’ve even verified that wpdb->query() is getting the correct query which it directly passes to the PHP builtin mysql_query(), but that mysql_query() fails to find the post with pending status when I’m not logged in.

So, while you’ve helped me get closer to a solution, I’m still really perplexed, because the PHP builtin mysql_query() function can’t possibly know whether the user is logged into WP, can it?

so I think, for the time being, I’m just going to add a custom meta to these custom posts and use that for the “inactive” status that I had been using ‘pending’ for, leaving all my custom posts with status ‘publish’ for now.

but I would still really like to understand more fully why this is not working 🙁