WP Cron and Event Espresso

Have you noticed Event Espresso has features that schedule tasks to happen in the future? Don’t worry if not. These features rely on WP Cron to make it possible. Let’s learn how it’s essential to have WP Cron running on your website and what effects it’s presented when it’s not running.

What is WP Cron? Why is it important?

WP Cron is responsible for running scheduled tasks on your WordPress site. It’s like when you create a chore on your phone’s calendar and set a reminder message one hour before it happens. On WordPress, the more straightforward examples are the “Update” checker that checks for available theme/plugin updates a couple of times daily and when you schedule a post to publish next week.

WP Cron is essential when you want to run scheduled tasks on your website.

Which Event Espresso features require WP Cron?

There are a couple of features that work smoothly just when WP Cron is running; check a couple of them below:

• Reserved Tickets: To prevent overselling caused by visitors attempting to purchase the last few tickets, our system reserves event spaces during the registration process and payment processing.
• Automated Upcoming Events Notifications: This Add-on can schedule reminders to be sent out to your registrants, days, hours, or even weeks before the event.
• Update Transaction Payments: A scheduled task checks the payment status and updates it.
• Clean out Junk Transactions: A scheduled task for removing any old transactions that have been trashed.
• Finalize abandoned transaction: A scheduled task for tying up any loose ends left over by abandoned transactions (not finalized for some reason).
• Batch Messages: A scheduled task that checks sends, and cleans up old batch messages.

How to check if WP Cron is working

Install and activate the WP Control plugin and access Tools > Cron Events; ensure the Hook starting with AHEE is present on the list. Then, ensure no error/warning message is on the Events page.

The DISABLE_WP_CRON constant

If you find this line of code inside your wp-config.php file, define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true); – it will prevent the WP Cron from working, remove it, and all should work fine.