Writing
Occasional notes from the jobs that made me build these plugins.
A scheduled job that runs twice, piles up or never runs is usually the code, not the server. The four mistakes AI-written plugins make with wp_schedule_event — no wp_next_scheduled check, an unregistered cron_schedules interval, one giant event, a logged-in-user assumption — each with the fix, and how to see what is scheduled.
WP-Cron is a check on page load, not a clock, which is why scheduled posts and backups run late on cached or quiet sites. How it works, why it misses, and the two lines — DISABLE_WP_CRON and a crontab entry with WP-CLI or curl — that replace it, including firing scheduled backups.
Image sizes left on disk after their original is gone: how they pile up, how a scan finds them, and why a size file is safe to delete only once nothing names it. Told through a scan of a long-lived library that reported 465 of them, every one of which still had its original.
The half of media cleanup that reads ACF fields, WooCommerce product galleries, custom post types and page-builder markup is the half the paid tiers in this category are made of. Why the split falls there, and how to test any cleaner before you let it delete anything.
The free media cleaner that is built to be wrong in one direction only. Six things it will not do — guess, trust a stale answer, forget the trash, touch work in progress, summarise, or pretend it can see everything — plus a Playground demo you can try without installing anything.
The show_admin_bar filter with a capability check, in ten lines you own: why a role name is the wrong test, why wp-admin is never touched, the three places the snippet can live, the complete script and how to verify it.
Three files in five said “Unattached”. Almost none of them were unused. A case study of a media library nobody could account for — the stranded PDFs, the old logos, and why the Unattached filter is not a cleanup tool.
Freshet Studio