There’s a bit of a misnomer in the WordPress community about scheduled posts that I hope to help clarify.

To start, let’s do a quick overview of the WordPress cron system. It’s a psuedo-cron, meaning that it doesn’t rely on a true linux crontab or the Windows version of scheduled task running. It depends on user activity on the site. If a user visits a page, it triggers a check of the scheduled tasks, and if it finds one that is in the past, it invokes the task callback. If WP_DISABLE_CRON is set to true, then the implicit behavior-based system is disabled and awaits for an explicit call to wp-cron.php. This is really the better option of the two as you can run a curl on the wp-cron.php URL from a true crontab and invoke the scheduler on a cyclical basis from the os task runner.
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If you’re looking to create a zip code radius search utility for your website, it’s much easier than it seems. I’ve based this tutorial off of http://zips.sourceforge.net/ which is not currently maintained, but has a good majority of US zip codes to test our concept.
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Here are a few functions to help you when interacting with files in your php scripts:

Find the owner of a file:
An array of information about the owner is returned.

function foo_get_file_ownership($file){
	$stat = stat($file);
	if($stat){
		$group = posix_getgrgid($stat[5]);
		$user = posix_getpwuid($stat[4]);
		return compact('user', 'group');
	}
	else
		return false;
}

Get the four digit file permissions number:
A permissions string is returned. Example: 0755

function foo_get_file_perms($file){
	return substr(sprintf('%o', fileperms($file)), -4);
}

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This is a simple one!

$user = posix_getpwuid(getmyuid());
$group = posix_getgrgid(getmygid());

We just released a new UpThemes plugin called Kint Debugger for WordPress. It’s a simple wrapper for the awesome Kint debugger class. It allows you to view variable dumps in a styled and collapsible output. Kint also allows for easy back-tracing.

Examples

global $wp_query;
d($wp_query); //styled, collapsible output
s($wp_query); //un-styled output

I added a couple WordPress specific functions to aid in plugin and theme development.

dump_wp_query();
dump_wp();
dump_post();

View the entire documentation at the Kint site.

Check out the UpThemes plugin page.

Download Kint for WordPress

Static class properties are the most efficient way to pass information from one class to another. Typically, one would place a variable in the global scope for other functions and classes to use. However, this is not a good practice as setting GLOBALS equates to a downgrade in performance. Using static properties allows you to store/retrieve data without instantiating a class object.

class IntermediaryData{
    public static $global = null;

    public function set($data){	
        return self::$global = $data;
    }
	
    public function get(){
        return self::$global;
    }
}

Use this in your classes to set and retrieve data:

IntermediaryData::get();
IntermediaryData::set($data);

A good use case for this functionality is passing a rolling list of ids to exclude from queries from widget to widget within a dynamic WordPress sidebar.

One of the most annoying things about WP nav menu admin is when you create a custom post type, you first must go to Screen Options and check the custom post type checkbox to display it for use. Here’s a hack I created to get around this and force the custom post type to display for all users all the time.

function display_post_type_nav_box(){

    $hidden_nav_boxes = get_user_option( 'metaboxhidden_nav-menus' );

    $post_type = 'foobar'; //Can also be a taxonomy slug
    $post_type_nav_box = 'add-'.$post_type;

    if(in_array($post_type_nav_box, $hidden_nav_boxes)):
        foreach ($hidden_nav_boxes as $i => $nav_box):
            if($nav_box == $post_type_nav_box)
                unset($hidden_nav_boxes[$i]);
        endforeach;
        update_user_option(get_current_user_id(), 'metaboxhidden_nav-menus', $hidden_nav_boxes);
    endif;
}
add_action('admin_init', 'display_post_type_nav_box');