WordPress 2.0 introduced a mechanism for programmers and plugin authors to schedule programmatic tasks to be run at designated times in the future. Glenn Slaven in his article Timing Is Everything does a great job of describing how this works. (Sadly, WordPress’s convention is that people write WordPress documentation to their blogs rather than contributing to the consolidated notes on WordPress’s Codex Wiki)
Called Pseudo Cron (or wp-cron), the facility alleviates the need for external programs to trigger internal events, using for example, the unix cron command.
Users of a WordPress site can’t usually see the events scheduled, so I built a simple plugin to show what’s due to run.
On the request of Jennifer Hodgdon of http://www.poplarware.com/, here it is. If you improve on it please comment and I’ll update this article.
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Thanks Joost, I’ve published this as http://codex.wordpress.org/wp-cron-dashboard.php
the facility alleviates the need for external programs to trigger internal events, using for example, the unix cron command.