Testing WP-Cron events

[jonathanbossenger]

Details

• Content type (Online Workshop, Lesson, Course, Tutorial, or Lesson Plan): Lesson
• Content title: Debugging WP-Cron scheduled events
• Topic description:
• Audience (User, Developer, Designer, Contributor, etc.): Developer
• Experience Level (Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced, Any): Intermediate

Learning Objectives

• Describe ways to test WP-Cron events using existing tools:
  • Plugins like Debug Bar or WP Crontrol
  • Programmatically using the _get_cron_array() function or the wp_get_schedules() function.
  • WP-CLI

Related Resources and Other Notes

Automation Code

//lesson

[MichelleBlanchette]

Is WP CLI or a plugin like WP Crontrol or Debug Bar the way we want to recommend? Perhaps briefly cover both ways?

I find WP CLI to be easiest, but developers may not always have SSH access or a local environment set up to use WP CLI (if they must debug something happening for a specific user, for example).

[MichelleBlanchette]

Possible reference to lesson #2797

[jonathanbossenger]

I haven't gotten round to it on these later lessons yet, but I usually base the lesson on something from the developer docs. In this case this is the relevant docs page: https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/cron/simple-testing/

[jonathanbossenger]

After reading though the developer docs on this (and using some of these things to test for #2729) I have altered the order of the three different tools.

The main reason for this is that so far in the plugin developer course, WP CLI has not been introduced yet.

There's an entire module on WP CLI planned for the Advanced developer course, so we might also want to leave that tout now, and then add it back in later?