Action in the future

lakmar

I have created a basic article publishing system in PHP. I want to add some more features. One of them is publishing articles on a future date.

One way of doing it is to set a condition, in the news display script, to match the date against current date, and then publish.

I Want to:
include a script that polls date, and if it matches dates specified, to do something.. [this script is not called through any other script, but should run in the background.]

Is it possible? What books/information can you point me to?

Thanks in advance 🙂

pete_bisby

If each article is in its own file, you could set meta tags with the publishing date:

Then use the get_meta_tags() function to query the meta data of each article file, and if the date matches then publish:

$article_tag = get_meta_tag($strURL);
if ($article_tag["publishdate"] == date("Y-m-d")) {
  <publish article>
}

justsomeone

You could also "publish your files to a "pending" directory, and tage each file with its publication date (maybe append the date to the filename).

A simple PHP script could then search through the pending directory for files matching the current date. For the matching files, it could then rename them as appropriate and move them to the live directory.

Finally, you could use crontab (assuming you're on *nix) to get the above script to run every day. (Or every hour, or whetever you decide)

lakmar

Thank You Pete. Appreciate the prompt reply. I shall explore the suggestion and get back if I am stuck.

Rgds

lakmar

Dear "Justsomeone",
I forgot to include the fact that I am using MySql. But, yes I do understand the concept of your answer. Many thanks.

I am hosting the site, on a LAMP solution and
A: do not know how to run a cron job.
B: dont know if the ISP gives us that kind of rights. But I shall find out.

Digression:
My foray into PHP is by accident and mainly due to chasing cheap hosting solutions 🙂 I absolutely LOVE the language, its programming power, sleekness [not fat at all] and awesome help in the community.

Rgds