Use a better backend for triggering events

Yeah, and i'de love to use something like this so it opens up more possibilities for weird scheduling

I came across the job scheduler module recently on another job, and it looks quite promising, and means we can drop a lot of code

It has a nice API for get/remove instances too.

Add a job.

  $job = array(
    'type' => 'story',
    'id' => 12,
    'period' => 3600,
    'periodic' => TRUE,
  );
  JobScheduler::get('example_unpublish')->set($job);

Work off a job.

  function example_unpublish_nodes($job) {
    // Do stuff.
  }

Remove a job.

  $job = array(
    'type' => 'story',
    'id' => 12,
  );
  JobScheduler::get('example_unpublish')->remove($job);

Optionally jobs can declared together with a schedule in a hook_cron_job_scheduler_info().

  function example_cron_job_scheduler_info() {
    $schedulers = array();
    $schedulers['example_unpublish'] = array(
      'worker callback' => 'example_unpublish_nodes',
      'jobs' => array(
         array('type' => 'story', 'id' => 12, 'period' => 3600, 'periodic' => TRUE),
      )
    );
    return $schedulers;
  }

Jobs can have a 'crontab' instead of a period. Crontab syntax are Unix-like formatted crontab lines.
Example of job with crontab.

  // This will create a job that will be triggered from monday to friday, from january to july, every two hours
  function example_cron_job_scheduler_info() {
    $schedulers = array();
    $schedulers['example_unpublish'] = array(
      'worker callback' => 'example_unpublish_nodes',
      'jobs' => array(
         array('type' => 'story', 'id' => 12, 'crontab' => '0 */2 * january-july mon-fri', 'periodic' => TRUE),
      )
    );
    return $schedulers;
  }