Auto Reminders

Could ChronoForms be set up to let users sign up to receive auto-reminders by email about a date they choose at a designated interval before that date.

Users can select whether to be reminded only once, daily, weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-anually, or once a year, and whether to be reminded any number of days in advance of that date, from one day to one year. Users may also select an option to view, edit, or delete any pending reminders.

I found this online:
http://www.tesol.net/scripts/RemindMe/

How would one include this code if the only way were to include it into Chronoforms?

Thanks in advance.

Dave

Hi Dave,
That project appears to be written in Perl, which would require a lot of work for it to work with Joomla or ChronoForms. It would probably be easier to write a new implementation from scratch, either as a standalone component, or a chronoforms form.

The key part here, is the Cron-job, which is a mechanism for the server to execute code independantly of visitors. Be adviced though, that far from all hosting providers provide any means of cron-jobs, and if they do, the implementation may vary a lot.

If your hosting provider does provide cron-jobs, then you'll need to implement some kind of poll-function (could use the extra tasks in chronoforms), which should be run at a regular interval, and should check a database table for active reminders that should be sent (and send them as needed).

The actual creation of reminders would usually be as simple as enabling the DB Connection in chronoforms. As for editing/deleting, this could probably be sorted using ChronoConnectivity with some slight scriptings for permissions...

/Fredrik

Fredrik,

Thanks for the summary. That helps.
I'll keep looking for something written already (plugin, component, etc.)

Dave

Hi dw1,

There's a JCron Schedulercomponent for Joomla! that might do the trick. (I haven't used it.) And I think that there are a couple of other schedulers around.

If you have a reasonably busy site then you can emulate a Cron job with a PHP snippet in a hidden module (using Jumi for example) on a frequently used page. When the page loads for the first time each day you run the job.

Bob

Thanks Bob.