“Update when Posts are edited” ignored

Note: follow up from https://wordpress.org/support/topic/update-when-posts-are-edited-ignored/

Question: can you tell me whether the toggle between ‘Don’t Post’ and ‘Post’ is checked on your posts? This is a different type of bug depending on whether the toggle is showing ‘Post’ selected, when it should show ‘Don’t Post’ or if the toggle is showing ‘Don’t Post’, but is posting anyway.

Do you know whether it said ‘Don’t Post’ when you first opened it, before editing, or did it change?

In the current version, that setting is a combination of checking the default status as configured in settings and a post meta for whether the post was previously saved with this value checked.

In the next release, I’m changing the value to no longer be persistent, because I think that the use case of “I want to send this update once” or “I don’t want to post this update once” are more predictable than the “I wanted to send an update three months ago, so it will now also send one if I update today” mechanic it has right now.

So the answer is “maybe”, it depends on the post’s history. You’d find it as the post meta key _wpt_post_this.

But if it’s showing as “Don’t post”, then it’s more likely that what’s failing is the check to see whether this is a new post or an edited post; those checks were fragile. I’m also reworking those. This is an old plugin, and the logic that calculated that was written *long* before post update actions had access to the $post_before object, which gives a much better way to assess what the previous state of a post was.

Would you be willing to test the updates pre-release?