WordPress scheduled posts not publishing — diagnosing missed cron jobs

Properly-installed WordPress plugins live in folders named like plugin-slug/. Folders with literal spaces, trailing -latest-N, or version-with-build suffixes like plugin_name 4.0-123/ are almost always re-uploaded ZIPs from a mirror or a nulled-plugin site. They ship with stale bundled libraries — updater shims, helpers, vendor code — that produce loud deprecation noise on modern PHP.

On one nonprofit's site, a plugin folder named literally divi_module_acf 4.0-123 — space and version-build suffix included — accounted for 11,038 PHP deprecation warnings in seven days. That was roughly 86% of the site's entire deprecation-warning volume. The repeating warning was from a years-old bundled updater shim inside the plugin. The site owner could not confidently say where the plugin had come from.

The operator removed the plugin, redownloaded it from the canonical vendor channel, and reinstalled under a clean folder name. The deprecation volume dropped by the expected proportion within a day.