Cron Jobs and Post Creation Discussion Only WordPress
- REFUNDED
Hello Community,
<em>We need some advice!</em>
We are currently working with many website projects that require a similar function, this function has to do with weekly recurring events and restaurant food specials.
The idea behind this is to automate the broadcasting of these events and specials to social media and more with 90% hands-off automation.
Currently we are using bufferapp.com & a third-party WP to Buffer plugin that broadcasts any posts (blogs) to social media. Limitation, you have to create the posts manually!
<strong>First Example:</strong>
We have a restaurant that needs to broadcast their daily specials (single custom post types) to social media (bufferapp.com).
Ideally we will create a custom post type ‘specials’ and have many specials posts already published, each day the chief will activate or deactivate a special via a custom field ‘true / false’ value.
The specials will ALWAYS be published for index-ability in search engines, but there true or false status will inform customers when they are available…
We then need to run a cron job that broadcasts the specials together in social media (bufferapp.com), 100% automatically.
<strong>First Solution:</strong>
Run a cron job at 11:45am every morning that creates a post using ‘wp insert post’ and combines the content + attached image from any custom post type ‘specials’ that has been assigned an active status.
Maybe run a second cron at (11:55am) to publish to bufferapp.com if no hook available with the WP to Buffer paid or free third party-plugin.
The new post title would be ‘Monday 17th Specials’. Within a custom post type (daily specials) This would give bufferapp.com something to broadcast, people could see the entire days specials from a url.
<strong>Downside:</strong>
Eventually you would need to delete the daily special posts. Not sure how complicated it would be to combine posts.
<strong>Second Solution:</strong>
Another idea is to have a static page and utilize a custom template that dose the looping, then just broadcast that page daily with bufferapp.com... How do we do reacquiring buffers?
<em>One thing I didn’t mention was the fact we also wanted to either utilize an automated newsletter or sms / push notification … those services might work better with the first scenario.</em>
<strong>Thoughts, insights, suggestions?</strong>
<em>The end client is a cook or manager of a restaurant, automating there lives is our highest priority.</em>
Answers (1)
Hariprasad Vijayan answers:
Hello,
I don't know how much i understood about this. Just writing my thoughts
<blockquote>Currently we are using bufferapp.com & a third-party WP to Buffer plugin that broadcasts any posts (blogs) to social media. Limitation, you have to create the posts manually!</blockquote>
I think we couldn't make this system fully automated.
Reason:
The user need to add each days special. Can't do this automatically.
One possibility here is, can schedule posts for few days/week(Don't know it is possible) and publish it automatically (http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/schedule-a-post/). Not fully automated. But help a bit.
You can use social media auto publish plugins are available for sharing posts automatically while publishing posts. I think this help to share posts to social medias.
<blockquote>Eventually you would need to delete the daily special posts. Not sure how complicated it would be to combine posts.</blockquote>
We can write function to delete posts. But you will get 404 error if some one navigate to that post from social media after deleting post.
Just my thoughts. Don't know its useful to you.
Good luck for your project.
Hariprasad.