I use RabbitMQ a lot via Python, and far less via PHP so my knoweledge of those libraries is pretty scattered. However, there's at least one pure-php library for RabbitMQ:
https://github.com/BraveSirRobin/amqphp
Did you take a look at that one before?
> Posting and retrieving messages for jobs. no need to subscribe and consume.
AMQP will keep your jobs around if there are no consumers. So if you want to just periodically consume, you can have a cron job start up your consumers then kill it after a while.
If you check out the RabbitMQ page, they have a few different suggestions of how to use their software:
http://www.rabbitmq.com/getstarted.html
But essentially they're just wrapping different terminology around the same thing---you have to have consumers and consumers subscribe to a queue and get messages from it.