Magento order emails not working

Since Magento 1.9.1, it seems that the emails are added to a cron queue that needs to be set up and can cause the emails to not work before that is done. As a developer, I have added

$isShellDisabled = true;

to my development site file cron.php after the last isShellDisabled declaration and it seems to be working, but is not the solution for live websites, only development purposes