Automatically email users of Web page changes - How?

brian_goodman

I would like to notify interested users of updates to selected Web pages by email. Are there any PHP scripts that can help facilitate this?

Thanks,

Brian

ZibingsCoder

Do you mean if a file is modified, or if there is a change logged into some kind of log system?

brian_goodman

One of our users described a school Web site where you subscribe to page change updates by entering your email. Every time the contents of the page changes you get an email with an embedded URL pointing you back to the site/page.

I'm wondering how complicated this would be to implement.

Our site is fairly simple - a php file that has includes for consistent header & footer and specific page content variables passed to the php file (hope I'm using the right vocabulary). The details of the specific pages are stored in an array (built with help from someone on this forum). Two additional functions are a Javascript calendar and a PHP Photo Gallery. So we have attempted some complexity even though the site is maintained by self-taught volunteers (myself included).

We thought that this subscription-oriented page notification capability would be very interesting to our user base. It would only be interesting to us if it could be automated.

Is that enough detail?

Brian

rikmoncur

javascript has a way of detecting when a page was last modified:

javascript:alert(document.lastModified)

I don't know if php can do the same thing?
Perhaps you could use it tho - something like "if lastmodified == today's date then send email".

But if you have ad banners updating on your page, the lastmodified date will always be a few seconds ago!

Weedpacket

rikmoncur wrote:
I don't know if php can do the same thing?

[man]filemtime[/man]

rikmoncur

cool stuff weedpacket!
Also on that page are links to other functions, including:


// outputs e.g. 'Last modified: March 04 1998 20:43:59.'
echo "Last modified: " . date ("F d Y H:i:s.", getlastmod());

So if last modified == today's date, Select your mailing list from your database, loop through the array and bung it out to the mail()

roseplant

No code, I'm afraid, but an idea just occurred to me that shouldnt be too difficult to implement:

Make a PHP script to check the Last Modified Date of each file(webpage) in an array of filenames (load the local server filenames into the array first if necessary). Compare it to today's date. If equal, send e-mails out with a link to the URL.

Now set up a cron job (via cpanel if you use that) to run this script once a day at a certain time.