Answered CRON jobs?

I'm not alone!

Quote from: dinocorn at Jan 14, 2013, 07:29 PM

I'm not alone!

Seems like I am! Never had the need for cron jobs for the site builds I did.

I do a lot of work with booking engines and scheduled emails/reminders, so cronjobs are an essential part of most of these sites.

There are some "external cronjob" services which will basically allow you to use their cron to request a url you provide them at set intervals, but it just doesn't feel right to me. It seems more secure and reliable to run everything internally.

Quote from: markh at Jan 14, 2013, 08:39 PM

Seems like I am! Never had the need for cron jobs for the site builds I did.

I have one site that has 16 cron scripts running, the business wouldn't work without them.

Including scripts to: send follow up emails, clearing daily IP hit counts, moving logs around, deleting orphaned uploaded files, checking for suspicious files, preparing data, general db maintenance etc...

I would say any serious hosting environment needs to offer some sort of cron facility.

Mike

I agree. Gotta have server scheduling features to really have Creative Freedom in your development process.
You can do some pretty amazing things with MODX + CRON. I've used it to add a simple ecommerce API that allows a MODX marketing site to consume up to date price and inventory.
The concept is simple:

• every X minutes CRON job evokes a php script that hits the Shopify API
• script parses XML and creates many individual text files that store product info
• in MODX I simple call a snippet uncached that returns the contents of the appropriate text file

So performance wise users never wait for markup to be served, site is essentially completely cached but dynamic in the very few places that need be thanks to MODX cacheing.

Also, I'm not unnecessarily making requests to Shopify often only 4 per hour.

Quote from: thingstodo at Jan 14, 2013, 09:46 PM

Quote from: markh at Jan 14, 2013, 08:39 PM

Seems like I am! Never had the need for cron jobs for the site builds I did.

I have one site that has 16 cron scripts running, the business wouldn't work without them.

Including scripts to: send follow up emails, clearing daily IP hit counts, moving logs around, deleting orphaned uploaded files, checking for suspicious files, preparing data, general db maintenance etc...

I would say any serious hosting environment needs to offer some sort of cron facility.

Mike

That is awesome. Ya with scheduling features you can basically turn your server into a robot!

/this

Quote from: dinocorn at Jan 14, 2013, 12:14 PM

Ya I mean I say forget the Evo > Revo tool and let's see scheduling features! Who's with me?

(judging by feedback at MODXpo Utrecht, likely no one)

For users whose cloud server doesn't have Cron, third party cron service like easycron.com is a good alternative. It's quite reliable with log and email notification feature.

(http://modx.com/blog/2013/10/23/modx-cloud-fall-2013-update/) :

We're committed to helping people build MODX sites, therefore, we've added more must-have development tools for you including, crontab (shell or PHP), Git, command line PHP, improved SSH, and rsync.