WordPress has a built-in cron function which plugin developers can use. This however relies on somebody visiting your site regularly so it can appear to be unreliable. They do a good job for internal functions, but you can’t easily trigger a script without writing a plugin.

Plesk calls Cron Jobs “Scheduled Tasks”, you can find those under Tools and Settings (in Hosting Provider View) or under Websites and Domains – Advanced (in Power User View).

I am using a plesk panel with godaddy and i cannot find how to set up a cron job. What i would like to know is whether wordpress has any plugins or set-up a cron job.

Many thanks

Roy M J

Finally I have got round to automating the process and the missing link was the wp-load.php. Use it like this at the start of your script:

require( ‘wp-load.php’ );

This assumes your script is in the same folder as wp-load and from then on your script acts like it has been called from WordPress.

I hope this is useful to someone else.

I suppose it doesn’t really matter if you (or someone else) triggers the file more often than it needs to be called since the actual time in between automatic posts is determined via the Plugin Settings. Say you call this file every 5 minutes, but you setup PhotoQ to only post a new picture once every hour, then it will only post it once every hour.

How do you prevent from someone triggering the cron job by just visiting http://www.yourdomain.com/wimpq-cronpost.php ? Is there a way to make sure only the server can trigger the task?

I’m very sorry you didn’t find the info useful – and reading back over the article I can understand why: the title is indeed misleading. I have changed it to “How to setup a cron job” because that’s what it’s about – nothing to do with WordPress.

Thanks for contributing the wp-load.php tip – I’ll check it out!

For anyone looking to do this, all you need to do is include the /wp-load.php file in your cron file and you will have you DB Config and WPDB Class.