WP-Cron 1.4 feed icon

WP-Cron 1.4 is now available for download!

This version updates the wp-cron-mail.php helper plugin for blogging by email. This version will now properly handle apostrophes and quote marks in the subject of posts, as well as in the body of the post.

New in this version is a wp-cron-update-links.php helper plugin, which will refresh the "last updated" value of links defined in your Links Manager. See http://mathibus.com/archive/2005/10/wp-blogroll for a tutorial on using the new wp-cron-update-links.php helper plugin. Thanks Mathias!

  • valerie
    October 13th, 2005 at 7:15pm
    Hi - thanks for the great plugins :) Any plans to have this one execute a weekly plugin hook?
  • skippy
    October 13th, 2005 at 7:36pm
    valerie: I've yet to see a need for a weekly action, which is the biggest reason I haven't made one. And WP-Cron is not entirely accurate with respect to execution, so something scheduled for weekly action might end up firing sooner or later, which may have undesirable consequences. Is there something specific you had in mind for a weekly action?
  • valerie
    October 13th, 2005 at 8:21pm
    I was thinking of a weekly for the database backup. I typically do database backups on Mondays but with the increasing number of sites I have to manage (and maintain for people who don't know what they're doing) it would just be nice to have that weekly backup emailed to me. Daily is just... a lot, you know. My opinion anyway... :)
  • skippy
    October 13th, 2005 at 11:04pm
    valerie: my theory is that if you get even one new comment, you should have a recent backup. It's easy enough to do, and you can fit many daily blog backups on CDR.
  • valerie
    October 14th, 2005 at 12:17pm
    Very true, thanks :)
  • Boja
    October 25th, 2005 at 2:53pm
    In wp-cron.php (version 1.4) the version show is 1.3 but plugin is 1.4 :)
  • skippy
    October 25th, 2005 at 4:05pm
    Boja: thanks for the heads-up. I'll correct that.
  • Havard Hvassing
    October 31st, 2005 at 5:14am
    My script just sent me 22 copies of the same file when used together with wp-backup. Could this have anything to do with the daylight saving?
  • skippy
    October 31st, 2005 at 11:21am
    Yeah, I got a deluge of backups this morning, too. It's almost certainly due to the time change.
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    November 3rd, 2005
  • Jon
    November 3rd, 2005 at 5:58pm
    I've modded the reminder plugin to call a php script that I wrote. If anyone wants to see how to do that (or at least, how *I* did it), check out: http://www.jonwatson.ca/blog/?p=702 Great plugin Skippy - thanks!
  • Luke Bosman
    November 6th, 2005 at 7:57pm
    I've downloaded this and have managed to receive emails from WP-Cron reminder. However, I'm having no luck whatsoever with WP-Cron-Mail. I really don't know where to start looking for whatever I have done wrong and would appreciate your help. Thanks in advance.
  • skippy
    November 6th, 2005 at 8:28pm
    Luke: Unfortunately, I don't do blog-by-email (and never have) so I don't really have any way to test wp-cron-mail.php. If it doesn't work for you, you might want to look at Postie or this Gmail plugin.
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  • anonymous surfing
    November 12th, 2005 at 2:40pm
    I've installed 1.4 (it also displays as 1.3 for me) and interested in using the future pings feature. I'm using WP 1.5.2 - does wp-cron / future pings work on this version? I've activated wp-cron, wp-cron reminder & wp-cron future pings and am getting nothing - no pings & no test emails. Are there any known plugins that don't play nice with wp? Also - as a workaround, can you advise what I wp file / command I could place in my cron to start up a ping? Thank you for any advice you can provide.
  • skippy
    November 13th, 2005 at 3:43am
    future pings doesn't work quite as well as I'd like. My limited testing of the plugin was moderately successful, but at least one person has reported consistent failures from it. The problem is the way WordPress 1.5x handles pings, which is neither flexible nor entirely appropriate to the workflow. Much of the pinging has been revised in WordPress 1.6, which should make future pings much easier. It's also quite possible that it will be a default feature -- discussion in the recent Bug Hunt suggested that pings be sent the first time the post is viewed, which would pretty much eliminate the need for this plugin.
  • anonymous surfing
    November 14th, 2005 at 3:49am
    thanks, skippy. thankfully, wordpress database backup 1.7 + wp-cron 1.4 works ok ;) Interesting enough, the backup 2 email works fine, but wp-cron reminder does not.. Any guesstimates on when 1.6 will be out? And in the interim, any ideas on what cron statement I could put in my host panel to ping all the service URI's? Sure, i could ping each service individually with curl - but is there a specific worpress file i should curl to get them all in one shot? And thanks for the response!
  • skippy
    November 14th, 2005 at 4:41pm
    I'm making wild speculation when I say that WordPress 1.6 might be out before Christmas. I really have no way to know, and the official release date remains "When it's done".
  • Le blog
    November 14th, 2005
  • The Lazy Blogger
    November 19th, 2005 at 3:31pm
    Skippy, I have been playing with the future ping setting for a few hours trying to see exactly what was going on. I was following a discussion on another blog where someone was saying their site pinged pingomation as soon as they published, well mine did too but I noticed something. Any blog links that I post in the body get pinged immediately. However, the script works fine as far as trackbacks and pings to sites in my ping list going out after the postdated time has occurred. Could this be all that is giving people problems or does the script fail at other times as well?
  • skippy
    November 19th, 2005 at 11:39pm
    Lazy Blogger: it's quite possible that that's the major stumbling block. My Future Pings plugin involves several ugly hacks: it first tries to disable the option to send pings to update services so that the default pings will be supressed; it then tries to tell WordPress that all the pings and trackbacks have already been done. I'm hopeful that the upcoming WordPress 2.0 will provide a more flexible framework.
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  • Bertil Gralvik
    November 30th, 2005 at 11:33am
    Skippy: ( Wow, my Gravatar is in place 8-) When I compare with yours, I realize that Gravatars should be like chameleons and automatically adapt their color scheme to the overall L&F of the blogs they are visiting. ( I'm sure it will be done - just take a note of where you heard it first ) Now, to the question of wp-cron & al. If I knew PHP, I wouldn't bother you with the elementary, but ... Activating wp-cron, wp-cron-reminder and wp-cron-mail, I get four unevenly spread mail messages in an hour, but my email posts are never fetched. wp-mail works though so the email post fetching mechanism would be set up correctly. Now, in your wp-cron-readme it says that the actions of wp-cron depends on some regularity of visits to the blog. Does this mean that any visit will launch a PHP session lasting for a preset time, and that wp-cron must react in that time span for it to work. I think of wp-cron as a "daemon process" checking the current time against a scheduled time - wrong I guess? In the readme it also says "The plugin will automatically create in your database the three options it requires." This sounds like three fields in the MySQL database. If so, what names do they have? ( I don't remember what tables and fields WP itself created ). If I install a new version of the wp-cron package, do I have to reset anything, i.e. in the database. Thanks for working so hard for lazy bloggers!
  • skippy
    November 30th, 2005 at 12:29pm
    WP-Cron does two things: 1) it creates three new entries in your wp_options table. These are named wp_cron_15_lastrun, wp_cron_hourly_lastrun, and wp_cron_daily_lastrun. 2) Every time a visitor comes to your site, WP-Cron compares the current time with each of the WP-Cron values. If the current time is greater than the interval for the current option (15 minutes, and hour, or a day), then WP-Cron will trigger the functions registered against the appropriate hook. As for wp-cron-mail.php, I can't help too much. I don't use POP3 email, so I've never actually tested it. ;) If it works, great; if not, please accept my apologies.
  • Bertil Gralvik
    November 30th, 2005 at 2:09pm
    Thanks - your explanations satisfies all I wanted to know! No need to apologize of course - after all its free. One may wonder if you have a built in remote control in the wp-cron :). I installed the script yesterday and "visited" my blog a lot of times - no bublishing. Today, as soon as I had finished my last post here, the cron published my long pending post at my blog. It's working!
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    December 4th, 2005
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    December 17th, 2005
  • Emanuele
    December 17th, 2005 at 10:36am
    Hi, I am using wp-cron.php just to backup my db each day. Do I need to update from 1.3 to 1.4? What's new? Do I just need to change the php file into my plugin directory? Thanks for your work, Emanuele
  • skippy
    December 18th, 2005 at 2:33am
    Emanuele: no, the actual wp-cron plugin is not updated in this version. 1.3 should continue to work just fine for your backup purposes. If you do upgrade, simply replace all the files on your server with the ones contained in the download.
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    December 23rd, 2005
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    December 31st, 2005
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    January 9th, 2006
  • louie
    January 9th, 2006 at 11:19am
    i'm using both wp database backup and this plugin. the backups that i manually download and the generated backup by this plugin does not have the same file size. is it really like that?
  • skippy
    January 9th, 2006 at 2:54pm
    louie: it's possible that the backups could be different sizes. How different are they? Just a couple bytes? Are the contents of the backups sufficiently similar?
  • louie
    January 9th, 2006 at 3:06pm
    there is a difference of about 20kb. i tried those backups i manually downloaded and they work perfectly fine. as for the backups that this plugin has generated, i don't have a clue if they're complete.
  • WordPress.com.br » WP-CRON VERSÃO 1.4
    January 10th, 2006
  • louie
    January 12th, 2006 at 2:15pm
    i tiried the backup file that this plugin made.. it's incomplete. and i just want to ask, am i downloading the latest version of this plugin? because what i see in the pluginlist is 1.3...
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    January 28th, 2006
  • Roland
    January 31st, 2006 at 11:19am
    hey skippy, first of all, thanx for your great work concerning the plugins you provide us with! question: what about wp-cron and wp2.0 - does the future-post-thing work on 2.0 or is version 1.5.11 still required to have the plugin work properly?! scheduled backup works fine, thats why i ask... bye, roland.
  • smdani
    February 14th, 2006 at 6:13pm
    Hi Skippy, I'm trying to use this plugin with suscribe2 in order to send daily digests. As for last day daily digest didnt work I activated wp-cron-reminder, but it sends me sixty reminder mail each 6 seconds! and fifty goes fine. any idea? a bug? mine problem? Thks
  • skippy
    February 14th, 2006 at 6:53pm
    smdani: WP-Cron is not entirely reliable. I'm not sure what you mean by "and fifty goes fine." You could try disabling the default WordPress cache (in /wp-settings.php). That may or may not help.
  • smdani
    February 14th, 2006 at 9:36pm
    I'll try it! Thks
  • daraperak
    February 21st, 2006 at 11:09am
    This is so odd. I've never had problems with this plugin but today got an email from the person I trackbacked to saying he keeps getting trackback notifications every 5 minutes eek! Could this be an incompatibality with WP 2.0? Or something else?
  • Sarit
    March 1st, 2006 at 11:27am
    Hi Skippy, thanks so much for all your great plugins, I love them. However I'm a bit ashamed to admit that I haven't figured out exactly how to create a cron action of weekly backups with it. I read the readme file etc and I'm usually quick with these things but do you think you can throw me a few hints about it?
  • Edward Gladwin Online » Blogging by email from America
    March 9th, 2006
  • Constantinos
    March 12th, 2006 at 12:44am
    Hi! I'm a fairly new user of WordPress, and wp-cron was one of the first plugins i tried... and still using it! good job.. One thing.. I modified the wp-cron-mail plugin in a few ways you might find interesting: 1) I added an options page to handle all the possible options. (enable mail, always notify, publish/draft, and all the new options I added) 2) I added a way to specify categories other than the default: By making the first non-empty line of an email have the form: {* category name 1, category name 2, category ID 3 *} etc etc, the post is assigned to the categories with the names or ids specified. If a category does not exist with the specified name, it is created. 3) Made it easy to replace the wp-mail.php file with a single call to wp_cron_mail (i.e. 2 lines of code - including the config file and calling the function), where the plugin now outputs the log to the browser instead of mailing it (or both, configurable via options) - this was to take advantage of the previous and the next improvements. 4) Ensures that all posts come from a valid email address. This is checked as follows: Email address is registered, or if not then email address is specified in allowed email addresses option, or if not then allowed email addresses option is set to allow all emails, or if not then message is deleted and sender is sent an email telling them so. 5) small change to the existing code for updating the post2cat table... removed the foreach loop, and added a single call to wp_set_post_cats (cleaner)... I'm using WP 2.0.1, and I don't know if this is new or not... Let me know if you're interested in the modified code!
  • emeff
    March 13th, 2006 at 8:21am
    Hi, I use WP-cron for blogging by email. I have one issue: The author of my emailed posts is not the account (=WP Admin) I want (different account for posting). Do you have an idea how to change this? A really nice feature would be: Checking the senders email adress to set the author of the posting and to valiate if the sender is allowed to post. (OK, let me dream, I know this is a WP job, not yours)....
  • emeff
    March 14th, 2006 at 2:04pm
    Ups, wp-mail does it already. Sorry for my postings! Perhaps you can delete it?
  • Constantinos
    March 15th, 2006 at 6:06am
    I just posted a download link to my modified file from above... As a side note, I just noticed a strange bug... all the spaces from my email where replaced by the text string "=20"... does anyone know why this happened?
  • Adam Messinger
    March 29th, 2006 at 5:53am
    Hi there. Great plugin! I'm currently using it for database backups, and it's doing a bang-up job. I was wondering if there's any news about the compatibility of the future pings plugin with WP2. Does it still work / work better? Also, is it compatible with the No Ping Wait plugin that speeds up posting?
  • Rouven
    April 14th, 2006 at 12:11am
    Thanks very much for this great PlugIn!!!! But I don't wanna backup (and emailed to me) my db daily. Is there a way of changing that?!
  • Kip
    April 21st, 2006 at 7:11pm
    Skippy - I just installed the plugin, and the the "reminder" plugin. The 15-minute one seems to be working right, but I've been getting the "60 minute" reminder every minute. :-?
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  • chris
    May 30th, 2006 at 7:26pm
    hi, i just realied that i posted my earlier post (between *** below) in the wrong version. Actualyl, I get this weird behaviour with all versions except the original. What do you think? *************************************************** Hi, I installed the script (latest version of WP, hostgator is my host) and the sixty minute reminder was sent 17 times to my email account within 7 minutes! Not sure why I'm getting the multiple emails when I'm expecting only one. Any ideas? **************************************
  • nikki
    June 30th, 2006 at 6:10pm
    Hi, I was wondering what's involved in using WP-cron to activate other plugins? Specifically I'd like to use it with Feed WordPress. Would it be wishful thinking to hope that it's relatively straightforward?! My hosting package will only allow me to run a cron job once a day, but I need to do it more often than this. Every 15 minutes would be great! For various reasons I cannot use the other methods suggested in the FWP documentation (pinging, POST, curl...) If using WP-cron is unrealistic, can anyone suggest any alternatives? Thanks
  • jazzle
    August 2nd, 2006 at 8:52am
    I just got an error :(
    Warning: array_key_exists(): The second argument should be either an array or an object in /home/sites/jazzle.co.uk/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-cron-1.4/wp-cron-future-pings.php on line 79 Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at .../blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-cron-1.4/wp-cron-future-pings.php:79) in .../blog/wp-includes/pluggable-functions.php on line 272
    It happened after I deleted a post. The post was a simple one liner, with no links. Any ideas?
  • uno
    August 27th, 2006 at 2:43am
    Are you going to update cron-future-pings and the other plugins for the newest version of wordpress?
  • skippy
    August 27th, 2006 at 11:39am
    uno: No, I'm not planning on updating this -- or any of my other plugins. The next major revision of WordPress should include a new scheduling facility, and solve the "future pings" problem in a different way; so WP-Cron and its helper plugins will no longer be necessary.
  • Olaf
    October 2nd, 2006 at 11:29am
    Hey Skippy. Thanks for that plugin. i found a little problem, posting letters like ä, ö and ü witch are usefull in the german language ;-) When i tried posting these letters the post itself looks like this: http://www.diewespe.de/2006/10/02/sonderzeichen-2/ I use Wordpress 2.02 and your latest pluginversion. Any suggestions? Thx a lot... Olaf
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  • Chris
    October 22nd, 2006 at 4:29pm
    Hey Skippy, I have a question regarding your WP-CRON-FUTURE-PINGS plugin. Does it only work for pingbacks and not the pinging of sites like tecnorati, and ping-o-matic? I have the plugin installed, and even when I create future dated posts, technorati is still getting pinged. I was told the plugin would supress pinging at the time of posting, and then do the ping after the post became viewable on my blog. I'm using WordPress 2.04. Am I understanding that correctly? Thanks for the plugin.
  • skippy
    October 22nd, 2006 at 8:08pm
    Joe Banner: there ought not be a problem with three backup jobs trying to execute at once. Chris: the future-pings plugin is supposed to prevent WordPress from sending a ping to ping-o-matic, as well as sending any pingbacks or trackbacks. It's not an entirely functional plugin, since it works by "tricking" WordPress into thinking it's already sent these. I haven't evaluated whether this plugin works with later versions of WordPress -- it wouldn't surprise me if recent WordPress changes prevent this plugin from functioning properly.
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    October 23rd, 2006
  • skippy
    October 26th, 2006 at 4:47am
    joe: check lines 25, 39, and 41-43 for the daily execution of wp-cron. The easiest option is probably to change line 25 to look something like this: $daily = mktime(1, 0, 1, $this_month, $this_day, $this_year); The first paramter to the mktime() function is the hour, so just increment that digit to whatever you feel like.
  • Futurosity
    October 28th, 2006 at 5:21pm
    Backups work fine manually, but I'm not getting any scheduled backups and wp-cron-reminder isn't working, either. Any ideas of what I should look for? Thanks for the great plugins!
  • Michael
    November 14th, 2006 at 4:41pm
    Hi! Thanks for your great work. I have installed wp-cron for scheduled database backups, together with wp-cron moderation and wp-cron reminder. I am running WP Version 2.0.5. The first day everything worked fine but then I didn´t receive any mails for many days. Today I received a bulk of 60 minute reminders, maybe about 20 per hour. I´ve disabled the reminder plugin now. Do you have any ideas about the reasons and how to solve this?
  • skippy
    November 14th, 2006 at 5:37pm
    Michael: sorry, no, I don't know the specific cause of that problem. WP-Cron has, from the very beginning, only been somewhat effective. It worked well enough on my own server, but I've read a lot of complaints similar to your's. The next version of WordPress is supposed to have a new scheduling system. It is an independent development, and does not use anything from WP-Cron. I have not tested it, and have no idea how well it will work.
  • Michael
    November 15th, 2006 at 5:44am
    Thanks your immediate answer and your great efforts. This morning I received about 50 Mails from yesterday, that were reminders, moderation requests and scheduled backup ...very funny!
  • Philippe
    December 8th, 2006 at 2:07pm
    Hello Skippy, Thanks for your work! I have a question though. Do you know how I can set WP-Cron to erase the ads footnotes in my emails (like from Yahoo! or MSN Live), so that my posts do not look like emails?
  • nano
    December 20th, 2006 at 1:32pm
    Hi Skippy, Awesome plugn, but I am having a bit of trouble with it. I've activated WP-Cron and Wordpress Database Backup v1.8 and I'm using wordpress 2.0.5. Anyway I want it to send me a daily backup to my gmail account... but it currently sets a schedule but doesnt do anything. I've run cron reminder to see if its alive and it is but i just dont get backups sent to me... and there are no visible errors. Any suggestions? And again cheers for the plugins... once its up and running its gonna be ace :) - nano
  • skippy
    December 20th, 2006 at 2:38pm
    nano: I'm no longer providing support for my plugins. Try asking on the WordPress support forums. In the interim, try executing a manual backup, taking care to select the "download" option: does that work? If so, repeat the manual backup but select "email" delivery. Does that work? Generally, if automated backup isn't working, manual backup won't work either.
  • nano
    December 20th, 2006 at 3:43pm
    Thanks skippy :)
  • nonhocapito
    December 23rd, 2006 at 12:59am
    Hi, I wanted to know if any of you knows of compatibility issues of 'future pings' with the 'smart update pinger' plugin. This plugin takes over the plugin functionality of wordpress, avoiding redundant pinging, and is very useful, but it is bogus exactly in the ability to ping future posts. I am worried though that 'future pings' may break 'smart update pinger' when it blanks out the list of pinging sites every time a post is published (and not only when the timestamp is in the future, which would be perfect) Thanks for any information you may have!
  • Dave Dugdale
    January 16th, 2007 at 11:56pm
    I extracted the files within the WP plugin directory. But when I went to activate it I don't see the your plugins. I am on WP 2.0.6. can you help? Thanks! Dave
  • Michael
    January 24th, 2007 at 11:26am
    I agree that weekly, or even monthly hooks. I have a few sites that use Wordpress essentially as a CMS, and are not updated often enough to justify daily backups.
  • Michael
    January 24th, 2007 at 11:27am
    Woops, I meant that weekly and monthly hooks would be a good idea
  • pilkster
    February 7th, 2007 at 11:50pm
    The next version of WordPress is supposed to have a new scheduling system. It is an independent development, and does not use anything from WP-Cron. I have not tested it, and have no idea how well it will work.'
    Does anyone know if this has been implemented? If not, has anyone tried wp-cron with WP 2.1? Thanks :)
  • Dave Dugdale
    February 9th, 2007 at 2:45pm
    I have tried it with 2.1 and can't get it to work, see my above issue.
  • pilkster
    February 12th, 2007 at 5:05am
    This is a tricky one. Noone on the support forums seems to have got any ideas either. http://wordpress.org/support/topic/105035 I really didn't want to get my hands dirty, but it looks like I might have to lol
  • Danny
    March 20th, 2007 at 7:38pm
    I had WP-Cron 1.1 for emailing daily backups, but only once in many months did I get a backup emailed to me. I am hoping that WP-Cron 1.4 will solve the problem (although on my plug-in page, it's listed as "1.3"). I also activated WP-Reminder just to get a little re-assurance that everything is working. When I came back a short while later, I had around 40 or 50 Sixty-minute reminders in my email inbox, all sent in a 20 minute span from 1:51 p.m. to 2:10 p.m., including 8 that were time-stamped 2:08 p.m. I hope my backups work!

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