Runng Cron Job for Plugin With No CronTab Access

Question

I have a site running WordPress and the Twitter Wordpress plugin (http://community.plus.net/opensource/twitter-wordpress/)

My host does not provide access to crontab, so I am looking for a way (plugin?) to run the Twitter Wordpress update automatically on a scheduled basis. According to the plugin website, this is possible:

If users wish to have regular/automatic updates of their Twitter account tweets, then that is achievable through creating a crontab entry, or similar automation mechanism, to execute the supplied “runTwitterScript.php” file.

The question is: how can I do this without cron access?

Answer 1

WP has cron-like functionality - have a look at wp_schedule_event

There's also a good little howto here: http://wpengineer.com/1908/use-wordpress-cron/

Answer 2

I love this plugin here (so simple) Crony Cronjob Manager

Answer 3

Personally I think this plugin is badly coded and should be making use of the internal wp-cron features rather than relying on an external cron.

I've looked at the plugin code and the update is triggered by this function twitterScriptMain(). So what we want to do is trigger this function every so often here is the code to do that every hour:

add_action("sc_twitterscript_cron", "twitterScriptMain");
function sc_twitterscript_loaded() {
    if ( !wp_next_scheduled( 'sc_twitterscript_cron' ) ) {
        wp_schedule_event(time(), 'hourly', 'sc_twitterscript_cron');
    }
}
add_action('plugins_loaded', 'sc_twitterscript_loaded');

Add this code to your theme functions file. I haven't tested the code as I don't use this plugin. Let me know how you get on with this.