Make future posts visible to the public—not just within WP_Query

In short, you can make future posts visible by telling WordPress to mark them as 'published' instead of 'scheduled'. You do this by using a future_post hook, which gets called when a post changes status. Each post type automatically gets its own future hook; since the custom post type I’m using is event, I can use the future_event hook. Here is the code:

function setup_future_hook() {
// Replace native future_post function with replacement
    remove_action('future_event','_future_post_hook');
    add_action('future_event','publish_future_post_now');
}

function publish_future_post_now($id) {
// Set new post's post_status to "publish" rather than "future."
    wp_publish_post($id);
}

add_action('init', 'setup_future_hook');

This solution came from this SE question: Marking future dated post as published

A caveat with this approach

The caveat I will add is that this makes it more difficult to get a
loop of just future posts. Before, I could simply use 'post_status'
=> 'future'; but now, since we’ve set future posts’ post_status to
published, that doesn’t work.

To get around this you can use a posts_where filter on your loop
(for example, see the date range examples on the codex here:
http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query#Time_Parameters),
or you can compare the current date to the post date, something like
this:

    // get the event time
    $event_time = get_the_time('U', $post->ID);

    // get the current time
    $server_time = date('U');

    // if the event time is older than (less than)
    // the current time, do something
    if ( $server_time > $event_time ){
       // do something
    }

However, neither of these techniques is as easy as having a separate
post_status for future posts. Perhaps a custom post_status would
be a good solution here.