HTML Newsletter - how to schedule it as a cron job?

yogimaster · New Member Joined: Feb 12, 2005 Posts: 3

Love it! It's so convenient to send out forum's posting to subscribers.

Question: is there a way to automate this process (through cron?) to allow it to send out newsletter every day at midnight?

thanks.

montego · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:29 pm

Wow, new ideas come at us every day! Never thought of this one. The difficulty with supporting cron is the PHP-factor (how do you kick off a PHP script from a cron job). Try checking out the following thread for possible ideas:

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Based on how the tool is written right now, you have to be logged in as Admin, so I am not sure off the top of my head how you could automate that (again, as currently written). I'll add it to our Workboad over at

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as something to look into.

I am using phpMySQLAutoBackup to do a back-up each night. I was able to schedule a task in Windows XP to fire up Internet Explore and pass it the needed URL. I wouldn't know how to get it to pass the URL string to an already opened browser window -- i.e., one that is already logged in to your admin account.

PHP really needs to have something built in for this! There are alot of things that I would like to be able to submit through cron. I really don't like the approaches for relying on web site usage (users clicking pages) to kick things off: 1) you have to have a very active web site, and 2) depending on what is being "kicked off", it could impact the user experience (i.e., long running processes).

Regards,
montego

sixonetonoffun · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 5:52 pm

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Its not a total solution maybe but it is another tool.

montego · Posted: Mon Feb 14, 2005 8:37 pm

Six,
Sure wish I had command line access to my hosted server. I see this tool requires both PHP to be run as a CGI (all the web hosts I have worked with lately compiled it as an Apache module) and server command line access to get it set up initially.

Just some things for others to keep in mind as well. Might work for some, but not very many of us "shared plan" folks...

Regards,
montego

mangaman · New Member Joined: Sep 13, 2004 Posts: 16

You might try phpJobScheduler

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. I found it once on another forum, I have never tried it though. What it does is you put a include at the end of a php file (i.e. index.php ) and every time that file is visited it checks to see if there is a php script that you have setup to run at that time. So if you don't get alot of traffic it might not work, BUT Like montego said:

Quote:

I was able to schedule a task in Windows XP to fire up Internet Explore and pass it the needed URL.

which might work in this case also.

It is somethig for montego and I to look at.

EDIT:
I just noticed the montego said he didn't like this type of scheduler, BUT I still think that it might work if you can automate a visit to you site at around the time you want you script to go off. hummmm maybe I will play with it to check and see.

montego · Posted: Tue Feb 15, 2005 6:56 am

Actually, mangaman, I think you may be on to something. If site activity is low, this could certainly be used couple with a PC sheduled to hit a certain page. So, why not make that page only submitted via this specially scheduled page hit.

We have to change the HNL to be "batch submittable". I.e., under a specially crafted new function or script, make it configurable for "hands-off" building of the newsletter and sending.

I like it!
montego

ecvej · Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 8:04 am

if you have c-panel it's easy to run a php script from the cron tab