Nectarine Imp

@forensicdev:
a ‘real’ cron would require a service / demon process running with root access. If you have root access to your host you can set up a real cron (assuming a non-windows server). The WordPress ‘cron’ reflects the knowledge that many sites have traffic pretty much every hour. So it takes advantage of this and use that to trigger it’s activity (since a web server only acts when prompted).

So, the broken logic is simply because it is trying to work around getting ‘root’ to setup the crontab.

I assume you want a plug-in that you didn’t write. Otherwise you’d just put the functionality in your theme functions php file.

There isn’t an official way of doing this that I have found. I’ve been digging around because I’d like some of my plug-ins made such that they could be included with themes. I can think of some hacks but I haven’t tried them. They won’t work with this site though – since it is pretty ridged where things go.

You could just include a message about what plug-ins are suggested and put code that check to make sure the plug-in functions are actually available and ignoring them when they aren’t.