Phil Broughton

For info, I could not get wp-cron working and this turned out to be because the call it makes tries to spawn a local HTTP request from the host providing server which gets blocked (a loopback request if you like). Using alternate wp cron worked in this case to allow cron to work (because it makes the client, not the server call the wp-cron task), however the backup plugin, once fired needs to do a local HTTP request which takes me back to where I started… Basically if my host provider does not allow local HTTP get requests, then this plugin doesn’t work.
I hope this is helpful, perhaps the plugin should document this under an FAQ ?

@mika – I have raised a fault ticket here : http://core.trac.ww.wp.xz.cn/ticket/23133 to follow this through as well.

I have exposed the php.info and server information here (password required, find me on facebook for a private chat perhaps!)

http://dev.crinniswoodmanagement.co.uk/

MYSQL details (obtained from phpMYAdmin on 8th January 2013)

Server: Localhost via UNIX socket
Software: MySQL
Software version: 5.5.25a-log – MySQL Community Server (GPL)
Protocol version: 10
User: xxxxxx@localhost
Server charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)

Server Web Software:
Apache/2
PHP Software:
PHP Version 5.3.10 / Server API	"CGI/FastCGI" / 20090626

Not sure how to check server caching is in play…

Update to my last post (apologies for cramming this all in!)

I reverted to default Twenty-Eleven theme (no child) to see if this would make any difference. At this point, I have pretty much a “vanilla” installation and still the post event misses its schedule (even with my clicking away on the front-end to spawn the cron event!)

So I added a plugin call “Cron GUI” by Simon Wheatley to expose entries in the wp-cron table and can see the following row that is for a post where it was not published as required on the “Next Date”

Next Date (GMT/UTC)
Jan 4, 2013 @ 11:28 (1357298880)

Schedule
One-off event

Hook
publish_future_post

Arguments
[0]: 358

So it leads into “how do I diagnose wp-cron event execution/failure” or worst case “how do I ditch 3.5 and revert to previous release where this was working without an issue?”

Daniel, thanks for the feedback, yes there is something strange about the internal setup of my WP site. It is in a sub-domain and has .htaccess files in its root folder to allow friendly permalinks to work successfully. However, if I schedule simple posts in the future I get “missed schedule” issues and the post never gets published. I have done the usual things (switch out plugins/extent cron.php timeout from 0.01 to 20.0 etc etc), but still no joy.
My issue with your plugin is perhaps only that it didn’t make it obvious that something else was wrong. Apologies and I hope that v3 does perform some better self-diagnosis prior to allowing jobs to appear to hang when perhaps they dont really start in the first place.
This is day 3 of googling for a solution, it must be out there somewhere :o)