It's always been my wish to run an ESL site!<br>I taught ESL for many years until getting into IT in the late eighties. My whole purpose of getting into IT was to seek help for my teaching academy, but once in the new realm, I was caught up entirely by it :)
<br><br>So I certainly would like to help you.<br><br>Running cron is part of the realm of the operating system, outside of Drupal.<br><br>Your hosting company will allow you to edit cron via a panel; they may force you to edit cron directly through text you enter, or they may have some kind of interface to make life easy for you.
<br><br>If that is not the case, then you will have to fill in something like the following:<br><br># m h dom mon dow command<br>0 3 * * * wget -O - -q <a href="http://mentor/drupal/cron.php">http://mentor/drupal/cron.php
</a><br><br>Please see the excellent documentation on the Drupal site at <a href="http://drupal.org/cron">http://drupal.org/cron</a> which explains all and gives alternatives to wget. There are also instructions for certain hosting companies like Dreamhost, etc. Check out the comments at the bottom of the page for some illuminating explanations.
<br><br>Drupal has a poormanscron module, but I would recommend running cron directly.<br><br>Once you have done this, you can now enable the core search module which will index your site, and you will be able to supplement the pearl script you are currently using with Drupal's powerful built-in search facilities.
<br><br>You should do this first, at least for testing purposes, to make sure you have cron running.<br><br>For your second step, you need to write a module which implements <br>The file cron.php invoked by cron calls <a href="http://api.drupal.org/api/5/function/drupal_cron_run">
http://api.drupal.org/api/5/function/drupal_cron_run</a> and this some housekeeping and then invokes all module implementations of hook_cron().<br><br>The search module, for example, does the following:<br><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">/**</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> * Implementation of hook_cron().</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> *</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> * Fires hook_update_index() in all modules and cleans up dirty words (see
</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> * search_dirty).</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
*/</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">function search_cron() {</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
// We register a shutdown function to ensure that search_total is always up</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> // to date.</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
<span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> register_shutdown_function('search_update_totals');</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
// Update word index</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> foreach (module_list() as $module) {</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
module_invoke($module, 'update_index');</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"> }</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><span style="font-family: courier new,monospace;">
}</span><br style="font-family: courier new,monospace;"><br>You would need to write a module which, in its modulename_cron() function effectively iterates over the users and carries out the changes you propose.<br><br>Cheers,
<br><br>Victor Kane<br><a href="http://awebfactory.com.ar">http://awebfactory.com.ar</a><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 3/9/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">Neil: <a href="http://esl-lounge.com">esl-lounge.com</a>
</b> <<a href="mailto:neil@esl-lounge.com">neil@esl-lounge.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div bgcolor="#ffffff">
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">Here is my wish: to run a cron job a few times a
day to update all Authenticated Users to Full Members once they have posted five
comments/forum posts.</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">My plan is to have all comments posted by
Authenticated Users moderated but move users up to the Full Members role I will
create to cut down on moderation work. How would I go about doing this? Is there
any documentation on <a href="http://drupal.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">drupal.org</a> about setting up cron jobs? There don't seem to
be any modules to allow this. Userpoints exists but isn't free. A simple cron
job seems to be the easiest solution all round. Has anyone else put something
like this in place?</font></div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2"></font> </div>
<div><font face="Arial" size="2">Neil</font></div></div>
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