Listing Renewal Notification Emails not working

[Kazza +]

Hi! I've just received a few emails from my client to say that he's not receiving email notifications for the listings he's placed.

The checkout settings are correct - ie allow renewals is yes and renewal days are 10.

I have searched the forum before asking this question; I've read in another post that someone has to visit the website home page in order for it to trigger any renewal emails to be sent - is this correct?

Any advice would be appreciated, thanks in advance!

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by Kazza

I have searched the forum before asking this question; I've read in another post that someone has to visit the website home page in order for it to trigger any renewal emails to be sent - is this correct?

Yes, that is correct.

When someone hits the sites front end, the database is checked for a lastdate value. If the last date is older than the current date the cron script is run which send out notification, expires old ads etc.

[Kazza +]

Hi! Thanks for the reply! Right I see....is there any way to get it to do this automatically - I've read somewhere about setting up a chronjob, I've heard of these but not sure how or where I would set one up?

[Lhotch +]

Originally Posted by Kazza

I've read somewhere about setting up a chronjob, I've heard of these but not sure how or where I would set one up?

And this is probably the reason it wasnt done like this from the very start.

Some web hosts dont allow you to use cron and the ones that do often differ on how to go about setting it up. I *THINK* you should just be able to create a cron job to run the script cron.php to get the desired results but you would have to try it to be sure.

For actually setting up the cron job itself you will have to consult your web hosts documentation to ask them how to do it since it varies from host to host. There is often an icon in the web hosts control panel.

[Kazza +]

Hi! Well I've set up a crontab file to see if it works - I've pointed it to the cron.php file in the includes folder - just a quick question; do you know if I need to include the admin username/password in the file or is the link to the cron.php file enough? (As you can tell I'm very new to setting up a crontab!!)

[Eric Barnes +]

Hi,

That is indeed the reason we have an internal cron job. Setting them up can be difficult if you do not have experience using them. For the actual cron job just have it run the includes/cron.php on a daily basis.

Then in the connections/classifieds.php file add: $manualcron = TRUE; This will prevent the script from trying to run it since you are doing it from the server.

Also admin information is not required and regardless of the time set it will still only run once a day.

[Kazza +]

Hi Eric!

Thanks for your reply and clearing up my questions. I've added the line to the Classifieds file - will give it try and hopefully it will work! Thanks again! K

[Kazza +]

Just to update my post; got the cronjob to work, I've been receiving renewal messages as expected. Thanks for all your help and advice! K