When “PHP cron event” is not available for sites hosted on WP Engine

Sometimes the “PHP cron event” option is hidden on sites hosted by WP Engine.

To have the WP Crontrol work on WP Engine, you have to ask their tech support to enable “WP Engine alternate cron” (Source: WP Engine)

When WP Engine enables “WP Engine alternate cron”, this will sometimes make it so you cannot see the “Event Type” option with the choice of “standard cron event” or “PHP cron event”.

Here’s how to fix it.

1. Go into wp-config.php
2. Find the line that says: define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, TRUE );
3. Edit that line to say: define( ‘DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT’, FALSE );

For whatever reason when WP Engine enables “WP Engine alternate cron”, it will change DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT to be TRUE. You don’t want that to be TRUE. You want that setting to be FALSE.

The plugin author for Crontrol has a nice page on Github that explains why you want DISALLOW_FILE_EDIT to be FALSE.