Thread

Hi there

I’m so confused with how the Cron Send Email plugin is supposed to work. I’m using it with the other first-party plugin called Cron, as it is supposed to.

Why does Cron Send Email claim to allow you to schedule the sending of emails, when it only sends emails when the template it is on is visited? Doesn’t seem that the time parameters has any function at all?

{exp:cron 
    plugin="cron_email" 
    year="*" 
    month="*" 
    day="*" 
    hour="*" 
    minute="00,10,20,30,40,50" 
    to="[email protected]" 
    subject="My Subject" 
    
    }
Content to be send by email.
{/exp:cron}

*** MODERATOR UPDATE - ADDED CODE TAGS

For testing purposes I have set the parameters to send an email every 10 minutes.

Maybe I’m wrong about something here, but I think think the Cron Send Email plugin claims to do something it doesn’t do, and if that is the case, please change the plugin information text to something more correct.

Hi Visualis,

The Cron and Cron Send Email plugins were originally created to solve a problem that isn’t really so much a problem anymore. If you’re on a host that doesn’t have cron capabilities, these plugins allow you to replicate that functionality to some degree, but they do make the assumption that your site is receiving at least enough traffic to trigger them as often as you want them triggered. That’s why they’re not a perfect alternative to running cron jobs.

Today, even most budget hosts give their users the ability to schedule cron jobs, so the Cron plugin isn’t as necessary. Since you’ve already got this set up in your system, I would recommend setting up a cron job on your host to hit this template slightly more often than the intervals you’ve set in the Cron Send Email tags above. That should get you the functionality you’re looking for.

Does that help?

Yes, thank you. I’ll just learn how to set up a real cron job i stead 😊

Hi Visualis,

I’m glad Kevin was able to get you pointed in the right direction!

If you need anything else, please let us know!

Cheers,