calendar Question with PHP, reading your computer calendar - php

Question

So I am really stumped because I have basic ideas but I am looking for some of your expertise.
What I am trying to do: I want to basically write an app using Twilio which you dont really need to know about because that is another issue. What that app does is call on a php file in my web host and "triggers the php code"
What I need help with here is how can I keep record in php of the calendar of the week for my computer. What I mean by that is if someone like an admin has a specific code that I have written for them, and that code runs automatically all week, but a specific week they dont want that code to run, instead they want a different code to run that week. How can I use php to find when a week has ended or keep track of the week using that calendar in bottom right of your computer screen so that my program will know after an admin wants a different code run from the usual code that the week is over no need to run that admin irregular code any more go back to your usual automated running code.
If you still dont know what I am talking. I will try to explain more. Think of 2 separate codes. One Custom and the other automated. The automated runs all the time automatically. But one day the admin chooses for that week he doesnt want to follow the regular shcedule of running the automated code as usual, instead for that week he would like to run the custom code and after the week is over go back to running the automated code as usual.
I hope that makes it more clear. I know that in PHP gives the date. But I really need expert opinion on how to do this.

Answer 1

Generally for something like this, I'd generate a "nextrun_datetime" for each and every script/user combination. By default it would have a repeat interval, in your case, 7 days.
If a user doesn't want to run it this week, they can "push" it out N days and the normal update interval would apply afterwards. To get the one-time shot, I'd allow an update interval of 0 or -1 to denote that.
With this sort of thing, whenever a script is updated (or saved, run, rescheduled), you can calculate the next date if there is one. From there, it's a relatively simple cron job that should check the last N minutes for any scripts to be run.

Answer 2

Unless your client machines are running on a completely different calendar than the server, why bother with wondering what the client's date is? Unless the client and server are in different time zones, the client date is going to be the same as the server date, except for a few hours around midnight.
As well, why depend on the client to trigger the server-side code? If this is a regularly occuring thing, use cron or whatever's available on the server to run the code automatically. If an admin wants to override WHICH code gets run, then you can provide an interface to change what's executed. Click a button on a site and a flag is set somewhere that tells the timed job to run script B instead of script A.

Answer 3

I've done something similar. Based on the day (e.g. monday, sunday) I would do something different in php.
this is how I did it:
$today = date('w');
if ($today== 0){
//its sunday
exec('rmdir C:\myApp\oldLogs');
}
else{
echo '1 -> monday, 2-> tuesday etc...'
}
you can also make a date from a string for example
$date = strtotime("8 days ago 14:00");
/*
or "Monday next week", "+1 week 2 days 4 hours 2 seconds","yesterday noon","10 September 2000" etc...
*/