Updating date and editions automatically every second Friday

TheManOfSteel

I would like to know if it is possible to set this up automatically with PHP.

This is what I would like to do.

I have built a site that is for a Trading Post type newspaper that will be published every 2 weeks.

Out now! (The edition number that updates automatically eg, 1, 2, 3, 4)

Also possibly the dates that are current such as: Available from 01 July 2009 to 15 July 2009.

So it would look like this:

Out now! Edition 1 available from 01 July 2009 to 15 July 2009.

So the bits in red would be updated automatically every second Friday by PHP.

The actual site is at http://www.minitrader.info

Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

Thanks

johanafm

date() and mktime() has pretty much everything you need to know.

For the edition ordinal:

// either
intval(date('W') / 2)		// first release in week 2
//or
intval((date('W') + 1) / 2)	// first release in week 1

TheManOfSteel

Thank you for your reply johanafm.

I am completely new to this.

How do I put that in to practice?

johanafm

Well, I don't know how the script will be run... It might be set up to execute automatically every other week with some kind of scheduler provided by the server's OS or similar, or it could be that you hit a button to "Publish", or it might be that neither of the above applies and the same script is run every time a user views the page and the date used comes from a publish date in the database.

I'll just assume that you have the publish date in $pdate as an integer. This could come from

	/*	In the case of pushing "Publish" button,
	 	or when the once every other week script auto exectues,
		or if you use a publish date for the article,
			and that date is stored as an integer (wikipedia UTC and unix time) */
	$pdate = time();

// Or, in the case of retrieving a publish date stored as a string representation of a date
$dateArr = split("-", $dateFromDB);	// Assuming a YYYY-MM-DD format
$pdate = mktime(0, 0, 0, $pdate[1], $pdate[2], $pdate[0])	// hr, min, s, MM, DD, YYYY

Then, onto the line you want to show the user:

Out now! Edition 1 available from 01 July 2009 to 15 July 2009.

// date info for this issues publish date
$weekOfYear = date('W', $pdate);
$editionStart = date('d F Y', $pdate);
$editionEnd = date('d F Y', $pdate + 1209600);	// Add number of seconds in 14 days.

// Edition number
$edNum = intval(($weekOfYear + 1) / 2);

echo "Out now! Edition $edNum available from $editionStart to $editionEnd";

TheManOfSteel

My goal hopefully is to make this automated, so it just does it by itself every second friday. The actual physical publication and the website are seperate entities. So I am not actually publishing anything as such. (I hope this makes sence).

What I am trying to figure out is how to make the edition number increase by 1 every second friday and (On the same day) change the dates by adding an extra 14 days every second friday.

Presuming this can be done; I should be able to set it and forget it shouldn't I?

I apologise if some of my questions sound a bit daft but I am new to this.

Thanks again for you help.

johanafm

Yes.

Either you run the above every time a user requests the page, and somehow pass in the publish date of the last edition, or you run the above every 14 days and instead of echoing the string above, you save it to a file (or similar), and then output the contents of that file when user requests a page.