confused with what is required

[wayne.r.whitten]

I’m fairly new to WordPress, but have been tasked to create a Newsletter for an office intranet site. I found yours and was able to get it running, but only with test messages using “Send an email with WordPress” and “Send few emails with Newsletter”.

The system shows a message that “The cron system seems not running correctly.” I’m on Windows, so I’m relying on the WP cron which shows as enabled in the diagnotics. I tried to schedule a test newsletter in the Status tab, but it’s not working. What do I need to do? Do I need the Feed by Mail module? Do I need to involve Windows Task Scheduler?

I have a few other questions, but this is a good starting point.

[Stefano]

Have you composed a newsletter on the newsletter panel? About the delivery engine and the cron system, refer to my documentation on the site. Probably you need a system administrator to setup some http calls to the cron system of wordpress.

[wayne.r.whitten]

Yes, I have composed several newsletters, and tested each. I just can’t seem to get the system to send via cron.

I’ve read your documentation about the delivery engine and the cron, but this is an intranet site (behind a firewall with a proxy) so I doubt it will work with outside/public services.

I am not yet good enough with PHP to test this without the use of a graphical user interface, and since I am using Windows Server 2008 R2 I am checking online resources to see if I can use the built in Task Scheduler. I do not have the luxury of working with a system administrator, at least not yet. So if you can recommend how to do the HTTP call setup I would appreciate it.

Thanks for the prompt response.

[Stefano]

Hi, I don’t know how toschedule a wp-cron.php call under windows 2008, I don’t know if this system has something like the wget of linux. You surely need a scheduled task which does a http call…

[wayne.r.whitten]

I found a few blogs on how to use Task Scheduler with PHP. Below is what I have working.

A daily Trigger: at 8:30 AM every day – After triggered, repeat every 5 minutes indefinitely.
The Action: Start the c:\xampp\htdocs\four\cron.bat

The accompanying bat file is simply this:
cd /d c:\xampp\htdocs\four
c:\xampp\php\php.exe -f c:\xampp\htdocs\four\wp-cron.php

I don’t know if all this is perfectly configured, but it does work.

Next questions:

1) Is it possible to only send notices and not the full newsletter? I remember reading this in your documentation, but am not totally clear.

2) How do I configure the plugin to automatically send a notice after a new post? Or am I required to create the newsletter manually every time?

3) I’ve been asked to find out if these newsletters or notices can be sent via individual schedules based on member preferences.

[Stefano]

The extensions feed by mail is able to send daily an autocomposed newsletter, but not user based, so the users cannot set their preference on what to receive.

Probably you need a different plugin, like subscriber2.

[wayne.r.whitten]

I’m testing another utility for individual notices. So that’s covered.

I’m confused between the Edit Newsletter/Status settings and the Feed by Mail settings. I’m in test mode to prove this works and need to understand how the automatic deliver is supposed to work, and with which settings. Thanks for specifying the Feed by Mail extension. I’ll try the settings. But I see the note under the Emails tab “No emails will be generated by this demo module.”. Is the demo version supposed to send automatic emails, or does it ignore the settings?

[Stefano]

The Feed by Mail module in demo version shows only the possible setting of the Feed by Mail extension, it actually has not the automatic email generation engine.

[wayne.r.whitten]

Does the Feed by Mail extension need to be purchased? I see membership is required. Is that the same as the free user account that enables me to submit questions like this?

[Stefano]

The membership must be purchased.

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