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I don’t know if this will be of any help to the OP, but I wanted to share my experience regarding cron jobs, WordPress and SNAP Pro as a Mac OS X user.
Due to my lack of experience with creating cron jobs under Mac OS X, I didn’t know how to manually set up a cron event for SNAP Pro, as it is explained on the SNAP Pro support page. So, I purchased a program called LaunchControl which allows me to easily set up launchd events, a.k.a. cron jobs.
At first, the program kept reporting an error 78 whenever I tried to set up the launchd event for WordPress and SNAP Pro. But then I realized what the problem was.
As it turns out, by default, the wp-cron.php file in WordPress does not include a shebang line at the top of the file. I am assuming that this is because WordPress automatically assumes that the PHP interpreter/binary is located in a certain place in the user’s OS.
However, this creates a problem when you are running a third party web server — as I do — and not using the OS-installed version of PHP. As a result, I had to open the wp-cron.php file in my text editor and add the shebang line, pointing it to the PHP binary in my web server setup. Once I did this, the launchd event — meaning wp-cron — and SNAP Pro began working properly.
The only caveat is that each time the developer updates PHP in my web server package, I have to make sure that I recheck the shebang line in wp-cron.php to make sure that it is still pointing to whatever PHP version I happen to be using.
As I said, I don’t know if the above information will help the person who is having a problem, but I thought it might be worth mentioning, just in case.
The plugin author should make sure that none of this is needed. We need to remember that not all wordpress users have the skills to do what is asked by the plugin. And, more to the point, the author does not really seem to care as he does not even reply to his own forum posts or even any submitted tickets. I am currently searching for a different plugin.While you can search for another plugin if you like, I can tell you from conducting my own search not too long ago, that while there are a few similar plugins, none of them are as fully developed as SNAP Pro, when it comes to functionality. SNAP Pro beats them all by a pretty big margin.
I agree that sometimes it can be difficult and frustrating to set up certain things in SNAP Pro, particularly when one does not have a lot of experience in such things. And, yes, in certain cases, the SNAP Pro documentation is not always clear, and is lacking. However, let me also say this. I am in my mid-sixties, and I really struggled with setting up some things. However, I persevered, asked questions, and researched, and I have managed to get eight social networks working smoothly with SNAP Pro. So, it can be done if one tries hard enough.
I disabled WP-Cron with functions.php and created cronjobs at the hosting panel. No problems at all.
Whatever works, but according to Ludwig — the developer — that is not the correct way to disable WP Cron. What you are supposed to do according to his online instructions, is add the following to the “wp-config.php” file:
//Disable internal Wp-Cron function
define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);Please refer to the link further back in this thread called “WP-Cron: Scheduling Tasks in WordPress” for more details.
I also set up my own cron job, but I had to do it differently on a Mac. But as with you, it is now working great.
Same issue here, keeps auto posting same posts (the oldest) again and again on Blogspot, while ignoring the other social networks (which is a good thing in this situation :))
George, are you using the “Publish Immediately” option, or the “Use WP Cron to Schedule autoposts” option. As was explained a number of weeks ago, if your WP Cron is broken, you will get multiple posts like that.
Since I first began using SNAP Pro, I have always used the “Publish Immediately” option, and it has worked just fine for me. However, a few weeks ago, possibly due to a SNAP upgrade, my settings were switched from “Publish Immediately” to “Use WP Cron to Schedule autoposts” without my knowledge. As a result, I too was experiencing multiple posts — as many as four reposts per post — across eight different social networks. It was a real nightmare — and very time-consuming — to clean up the mess each time that I posted.
But then I learned that this was due to a broken WP Cron. I had never set up WP Cron, so it was not configured properly, thus resulting in the many duplicate posts. Well, I set it back to “Publish Immediately”, and all was well again. That is, no more duplicate posts.
However, I really wanted to do things the right way, so after a lot of frustration, and buying a Macintosh app called “LaunchControl” to create launchd plists — or cron jobs — I figured out how to properly set up “Use WP Cron to Schedule autoposts”. It has been working fine ever since.
I wanted to offer a big tip for fellow Mac OS X users who may be having difficulty getting their cron job to work for SNAP Pro.
As mentioned above, in my case, I purchased and used the app called LaunchControl. However, I kept getting an exit error of 78 with the app.
Then I discovered why, what was wrong, and how to fix it.
The problem is that by default, WordPress’s “wp-cron.php” file does NOT have a shebang line — or interpreter line — at the very top of it. You need to add it yourself. This is the line which begins with “#!”. After typing “#!” — without the quote marks — you need to add the path where your PHP binary is located.
As soon as I did that, my cron job started working, and I am happily posting to my social networks again via SNAP Pro.
I hope this bit of information helps other Mac OS X users out there.
Blatchy, thank you for sharing this information. Today I finally figured out how to set up a cron job for SNAP Pro on my iMac, and I also noticed that even though I enabled the comment import feature, nothing is being imported into my blog from any of the social networks in which I participate. I think it is disappointing that the plugin does not import comments from Facebook timelines, because that is where most of my friends post their comments on Facebook, with some comments in my FB Closed Group as well. What about groups? Will SNAP Pro import comments from there? Thanks!
After a certain amount of frustration, and some help from the developer of the LaunchControl app, I was finally able to properly set up a cron job for SNAP Pro this afternoon. To be honest, as a Premium API paying customer, I am disappointed that after more than a week, NextScripts has failed to even address my inquiry here.
I still think it would be a good idea for NextScripts to add a tutorial regarding how to set up the cron job on a Mac OS X machine. It is not fair to us paying Mac users, that the tutorial only addresses WP-Cron scheduling tasks for cPanel and Plesk.
Well, as it turns out, my solution was a lot simpler.
I have never set up WP-Cron in my SNAP setup, because I don’t know how to set up a cron job on Mac OSX using launchd and creating a plist file. I have researched it online, but I still don’t know how to do it. If you could create a Mac OS X tutorial which explains all of it step-by-step, that would be great. Your WP-Cron page only has setup instructions for other platforms which use C-Panel, but not Mac OS X.
In fact, I even went to EasyCron and set up a cron job. But then I noticed that it is only a 7-day free trial, and after that, it is big money. 🙂
Anyway, when I went to the settings page in SNAP, I was surprised to discover that it was set to “Use WP Cron to Schedule autoposts”. I found this odd, because I have always had it set to “Publish Immediately”, because I don’t know how to create a cron job. I am wondering if one of your recent automatic API updates switched it over for some reason.
Well, the minute I switched back to “Publish Immediately”, all of my duplicate autoposts stopped. Yes, it takes a minute or two to autopost to eight social networks, but at least now I am not wasting so much time removing 2-4 duplicates for each post that I make, and I usually make 10-20 posts per day per social network.
Well, that is at least three of us now who are experiencing this, so even though he hasn’t responded yet, hopefully, Ludwig is aware of this issue, and is already working on it behind the scenes. He has been pretty good with support over the years.
Well, it is still happening on my end, and Ludwig hasn’t responded here or via email, so at this point, I don’t know.
Apparently the issue is fixed. I can auto-post to my Facebook closed group again. I don’t know if Facebook did something to fix it, or if Ludwig did something. If it was you, Ludwig, thank you! 🙂
Please disregard the above message regarding Facebook. It appears that the problem is now fixed.
It would be nice if there was a way to edit and/or delete our messages here in the NextScripts forum. If there is a way, I am not aware of it. 🙂
Please disregard my above comments regarding Blogger. That problem is now fixed.
However, the auto-posting error I get with Google+ regarding “agent_failure” is still NOT fixed. Any ideas would be appreciated. Thanks!
UPDATE TO MY PREVIOUS POST:
It seems that this problem is larger than I first realized. I just discovered that even though I have made no changes to my settings in the SNAP Pro plugin, the image part of my posts is no longer being auto-posted on Blogger either. The Blogger site is only showing the text part of each of my posts, even for older posts, where the image once showed.
As noted earlier, on the Google+ site, my WP blogs are now not even showing at all. Only links to my Blogger posts are showing, but WITHOUT images.
Being as these two social networks are owned by the same people, I am wondering if they are in the middle of fiddling around with their API code, and that is what may have broken things on BOTH sites. But this is just a guess on my part.
As I said, I have made no changes in either my Blogger or Google+ account settings in my SNAP Pro plugin.
