Category: WordPress

Improve WP Cron with Real Cron Job or Monitoring Sites

Default WP setups use a virtual cron feature where maintenance and scheduled tasks occur when site scripts are triggered (when somebody visits site).

That works fine for active sites that have a fluent visitors stream. On projects where WP is not fluently visited these task don’t get triggered as expected.

Solution 1

Setup a real cron job from cPanel .

/usr/bin/wget -q -O – http://[yourwebsite.com]/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron >/dev/null 2>&1

Can be hourly or each 15, 30 minutes.

Warning: Running cron very often like each 1-4 minutes can result in high resource load on account (and downtime depending on available hosting resources).

Optionally disable WP cron from wp-config.php :

define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’, true);

Solution 2

Schedule an online  status monitoring service to check your WP based site.  When they check they will also trigger your WP scripts.

Ex. StatusCake.com or UptimeRobot.com

You can also easily setup calls using EasyCron service.

WP cron triggers various functionality:

  • Checking for theme & plugin updates
  • Publish scheduled posts
  • Sending pingbacks
  • Other actions scheduled by plugins like converting videos, cleaning files or database

Schedule Videos as Live Streaming Channels

In latest Broadcast Live Video solution, channel owners can schedule existing videos to play as live streaming channels.  This can be used to simulate a live stream / broadcast from previously recorded videos.

This is based on Wowza Streaming Engine SMIL playlist functionality (requires Wowza Hosting). Plugin includes an editor to easily schedule videos from Video Share VOD in a playlist.
lb-playlistsYou can create an elaborate schedule with many playlists of videos scheduled to play on each channel:

  • For on-demand stream sources, use either 0 or a positive number for thestart parameter. A positive number will start that number of seconds into the video.
  • To play the source until the end, use -1 for the length parameter. Any positive value will play the source for that number of seconds.
  • To loop through the schedule, set repeat to true. Setting repeat to falsewill shut down the stream after the playlist has finished. Later playlists aren’t loaded unless they start before the non-repeating playlist ends.
  • Set the scheduled parameter to start the playlist at a specific time. If the begin time is in the past, each playlist is loaded in order and immediately replaces the previous playlist for the stream.