alogblog's MTy plugins

Scheduled Tasks

In blog system, what tasks can be scheduled? As told you above, MT's "Scheduled" publishing feature is a very good example. What else?

If you use a moblogging tool, you could schedule this task. I made GMoblog Perl script which enables you moblogging by using GMail. You send mail having image or only texts to your GMail account.Then this mail will be published by scheduled publishing task.

And another well-known example is getting your favoriate RSS/ATOM feeds to blog server. You can't use this feature in dynamic publising mode because fetching feeds and customizing it with your tastes are comparatively time-consuming task. So this should be proccessed backgroundly by scheduler.

Installation

Download this plugin and untar it under mt home, then files will be located in sub-folders as below.

• (mt home)/plugins/alogblog/webCron.pl


• (mt home)/plugins/alogblog/webCron.cgi


• (mt home)/php/plugins/function.MTWebCronTrigger.php

Open webCron.cgi, and edit two variables accorging to your environment.

$url_of_this = 'http:/www.example.com/mt/plugins/alogblog/webCron.cgi';
$alogblog_path = '/path/to/your/mt/plugins/alogblog';

Tag Usage

<MTWebCronTrigger> : Add this tag in blog's Main Index template or Individual Entry Archive as you like. More trigger tag you add, better scheduling performance, but more resource-consuming.

Role of this tag : If a visitor request that page which embeds trigger tag, then it triggers webCron.cgi which looks into scheduling-tasks table and if time is up, requests recursively webCron.cgi to run tasks. webCron.cgi acts like normal CGI and normal Perl script which run commands. Easily you can consider it as a normal counter.

If you move webCron.cgi to some other place, then you can tell it by src attribute as like: <MTWebCronTrigger src="http://www.example.com/some/path/to/webCron.cgi" >

Note: You'd better add this tag in the bottom of the page before </body> tag.

Setting scheduling Tasks

Each blogs can have its own scheduling tasks. Go to Weblog Configuration -> Plugins page.

You can add one task per a line. One task line is comprise of two sections. First is interval time. 10( or 10s) means every 10 seconds. 20m is 20 minutes, 30h is every 30 hours, 40d is every 40 days. 0 means no work. You can't set it like "1h 20m". Just one time factor.

Second section is command. This command section require a little attention of PATH. If you have no idea, write a full path.

Default task line is "0 cd /path/to/your/mt/; perl tools/run-periodic-tasks". If you set it to another value, then this task table is written to folder plugins/alogblog/webCron. So if a permission to create this folder and write to task table file, MT will show you error meaasges. If then, you have to make a webCron subfoler and give write-permission to it manually.

Taste a Pie

Follow next steps.

• Install this plugin


• Add <$MTWebCronTrigger$> tag to the most-bottom(before body tag) of Main Index template, and Save and Rebuild.


• Post a test entry, set Post Status to "Scheduled", and set Authored On to near future time(ex. 1 minute from now). Save and goto entry listing page, then you can see that entry's status be "Scheduled".


• Time to set scheduling task table. Go to blog's plugin page, then in WebCron setting, modify interval. Because this is a test and you want to see result ASAP, set interval 10. In every 10 seconds, if a vistor triggers, then scheduled task is run if its predefined time is up. Save Changes.


• Now you act like visitor to your blog. Because we add trigger only to Main Index, open blog home page. If your triggering is done, after 10 plus some time to complete scheduled task(in this case, time to publish all entries having scheduled status), reload entry listing page, then previous entry's staus will be shown as Published, Reopen blog home, then new entry will be shown.

Note

If you want a task to be run on EXACT time you set, and it's of no use to run it after that time, the webCron is not what you want. The only way you can choose is to make much more money and buy your own server or premium hosting service. Only "cron" would make you happy.

But in very very most of cases, especially in blogging system, I think there is no such a delicate task.

Question:
I set to publish some entries in the END of this year, and there is no visitors(= no triggering) for one month since next new year. What if to my scheduled entries, then ?

Answer:
Exactly for one month (by the first visitor comes), your scheduled publishing task will absolutely never be done/published. Oh~ bad webCron!
But I can tell you this. "If there is no visitors for one month, there is of no use to publish entries till visitors come."

License

Released under the Creative Commons License.

Version History

• 3.2.01: for MT 3.2