WordPress – Jetpack post already published posts via Publicize 2019

Jetpack (a highly recommended plugin provided by Automattic) has many great features but the one that we find ourselves promoting the most is it’s Publicize feature. This feature lets you automatically push your posts to Twitter, Facebook, etc. when Publishing that post to your blog. This is a great feature that can same you or your team a ton of time – relieving you from having to manually post this content on each social platform.

Once the plugin is activated, you’ll see the ability to easily connect all your social accounts. Once connected, all additional posts that you Publish will now give you the option to also post these to each social platform.

That’s nice and all but what happens if you already have a large number of posts that you’d like to backfill to your various social accounts? Well you’re in luck, the walkthrough below will explain the edit that’s needed in order to allow Jetpack’s Publicize feature to also allow for this.

In previous versions of WordPress this was solved a bit differently. The Jetpack module was updated recently for the WordPress 5.0 update which introduced the “Blocks” post composition functionality. Looking in Jetpack’s documentation:

https://jetpack.com/support/publicize/

You’ll see a “Publicize in the Block Editor” section which is how we figured there must be a new way for the code to be handling things. Turns out there’s a function called “post_is_done_sharing” on line 394 in wp-content/plugins/jetpack/modules/publicize/publicize-jetpack.php:

The second half of the return statement checks to see if the post has ever been published before. Changing it from:

return 'publish' == $post->post_status || get_post_meta( $post->ID, $this->POST_DONE . 'all', true );

to

return 'publish' == $post->post_status;

Allows the post to be set back to draft and republished again just like the original article says.

And that should do it! Let us know if this helps of if you’ve found an alternative solution.