wp_insert_post went into infinity loop problem or return blank page

If you customize WordPress and used wp_insert_post to insert a post into WordPress manually, you might face a problem like i do. The page will go into infinity loop and you ended up on an empty or blank page instead of returning you to your original page/post.  You will start digging into your own code before looking into code. Finally, you found nothing seems to go wrong with your code and start digging into WordPress code. There, you will find wp_insert_post causing you this problem.

wp_insert_post problem

the problem lies with user capability when one use wp_insert_post to give other user the ability to insert post into WordPress. wp_insert_post uses the method current_user_can to check whether the given user has the capability to publish a post. After that i too have no idea what went wrong. However, this only happen when you set your post_status as publish. If you happen to change publish into other status such as draft, you will find that you can successfully insert your WordPress post without the problem of going into an infinity loop. However, this doesn't happen to every WordPress setup. Apparently my TEST environment doesn't seems to get such behavior compared to my LIVE one. Furthermore, if you dig deeper into WordPress wp_insert_post used methods, you will find that none of them are using any expensive loop or redirect function. Therefore, i suspect one of the method in wp_insert_post is performing a checking with user capability and publish post. a lighten me if you manage to find out what's wrong.

wp_insert_post solution

But i want my user to have the capability of a subscribers but is able to publish a post themselves. If you are like me, you may want to try to bypass the checking on publish post. If you look into the code implementation of wp_insert_post, you will find that most of the checking are looking for the keyword publish. Another alternative to publish your post without using the keyword publish is to use alternative keyword, future. The keyword future allows you to publish your post almost instantly similar to publish but it is a bit slower as the schedule will have to take care of publishing the article of yours. That's it, you shouldn't be getting an infinity loop after using future instead of publish! Good luck!

3 thoughts on “wp_insert_post went into infinity loop problem or return blank page

  1. Good tip. I am experiencing the same problem and did as you said searching through plugin code until I found out it was WP itself and wp_insert_post... I'd also be interested in a solution..

  2. Great man, this "future" thing solved by problem. i'm reading in some feeds and save them as post to make them findable for Google. But dunno atm if wp_insert_post is triggering the updateservices.

  3. @Balko: that is exactly what i did too but usually these are duplicate content and Google won't really be bother about it though.

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