One aspect of the installation which needs some expansion is the running of the sendnotice.php script.
sendnotice.php is the script which sends out auction notices to buyers and sellers, expires ads and sends out notices to users that their ads are about to expire (and gives them the option to renew them).
Under the old system, this script was run once a day; because of the addition of auction, we now recommend this script be run every 5-15 minutes to ensure timely delivery of notices to auction winners. If you do not plan to use auctions at all, you can continue to run this script once a day.
WITH AUCTION, EVERY 10 MINUTES
If you have access to cron scripts (you may need to contact your host for this), we recommend a cron entry that will execute the script every 10 minutes:
*/10 * * * * /usr/bin/wget --spider
http://www.viperalley.com/classifieds/sendnotice.php
The */10 tells cron to run this script every 10 minutes.
Windows users who do not have access to cron jobs will want to use the Task Scheduler to add an entry to run the script using the PHP.EXE executible, for example:
C:\PHP\PHP.EXE C:\INETSRV\WWWROOT\CLASSIFIEDS\SENDNOTICE.PHP
WITHOUT AUCTIONS, ONCE A DAY
To accomplish running the task once a day, I've inserted a script called
classifieds in my /etc/cron.daily directory which contains the line:
#!/bin/sh
/usr/bin/wget --spider
http://www.viperalley.com/classifieds/sendnotice.php
You can also enter this cron job directory into your crontab file with the format:
30 0 * * * /usr/bin/wget --spider
http://www.viperalley.com/classifieds/sendnotice.php
Which will execute the script at 12:30am each day.
Link for information about cron jobs:
https://panel.dreamhost.com/kbase/index.cgi?area=2506
wget information:
http://www.gnu.org/software/wget/wget.html
You can also execute the script manually by running the URL in your browser if need be, but this is very inefficent.