Generate Email if No Posts Within Time Period

Question

I want an email to be sent to a specific list of email addresses if/when there have been no posts on the blog within the past 1 week. Any ideas on how I could do this?

Answer 1

You'll need to set up a cron job that checks once a day to see if the latest post is more than seven days old.

So, some where in a plugin file. Schedule a new event. Then hook into that event. Grab the post date, turn it into a unix time stamp, and compare that with the current time.

<?php
register_activation_hook( __FILE__, 'wpse29671_activation' );
function wpse29671_activation()
{
    wp_schedule_event( time(), 'daily', 'wpse29671_cron' );
}

add_action( 'wpse29671_cron', 'wpse29671_maybe_send_email' );
function wpse29671_maybe_send_email()
{
    // get the latest post
    $posts = get_posts( array( 'numberposts' => 1 ) );
    if( ! $posts ) return;

    // Latest posts date as a unix timestamp
    $latest = strtotime( $posts[0]->post_date );

    // how long has it been?
    $diff = ( time() - $latest ) / ( 60 * 60 * 24 );

    // if it has been more than 7 days, send the email
    if( $diff >= 7 )
    {
        wp_mail( 'youremail@yoursite.com', 'Better Write a Post!', 'Hey, you should go write a blog post or something' );
    }
}

As a plugin: https://gist.github.com/1246814

Alternatively, you could use DateTime objects to do the time comparison or just use this plugin (but it's way more fun to figure it out yourself, just sayin').