During our beta period we’ve been trying to put Postmatic on as many different web hosts as possible. Things get pretty weird out there.

Our most common problem has been with (sorry, this gets technical) wp_cron misfiring, refiring, not firing, and in general having been coerced to be involved in all sorts of nonsense. Especially on lower-end hosts. This leads to multiple copies of a post being mailed upon publishing. And then mailed again. And sometimes even again and again. It was embarrassing.

Fixing that took a lot of work, but it was worth it

Dylan pulled out all of the stops to come up with a solution to make sure this never happens again. The details? I’m not sure. He’s way smarter than I. But the result is that each and every email that flies through the system is sorted, sifted, sniffed, marked, tracked and screened in order to make sure it never goes out twice. And it works very nicely. Even on shoddy hosts. Adios duplicate emails!

A nice bonus

Since things are now tracked so closely it became possible to add a new option to the edit > post screen. Now when you write a new post you can override Postmatic and choose to not have that post emailed out.  Next we’ll be adding a feature to this area in which you will be able to watch the realtime delivery of your post, as it happens. There’s a little counter that’ll tick up showing how many emails have been delivered. Fancy.

This actually solves a lot of previously unanswered questions such as what happens if you migrate a site and import a bunch of posts? What about if you republish a post?  All of this has been taken care of. Cheers, Dylan and Ankur!