Running a background process on an ecommerce website - php

I have programmed in C/C++, but I have no experience in web programming. Someone asked me to help them build a e-commerce website selling a service. I started looking into using PHP/MySQL for building the site.
My question is: given that HTTP is stateless, how do we get some background process to trigger so that it may, for instance, gather the list of customers and then send an email with the list in it to some known email address? I want this task to run, say every day at a set time, and not only when a user accesses or performs some action on the site.

You will want to use a cron job.
My favorite tutorial: http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html

Cron job?
Maybe this will help: http://www.thesitewizard.com/general/set-cron-job.shtml

Related

How To Add "User Account" Functionality To Basic PHP Software?

I hired a programmer to make a basic program in for me that is written in PHP.
I am hosting it on my own web host.
It is basically a web crawler that returns data on certain websites that are entered into the database.
This software was created without any "user account" functionality- it is just a single instance that is not even properly protected by a login/password button.
I want to finish developing this cloud-hosted software and then be able to sell it to people on a monthly subscription. Obviously I will need a way to create an account for every person that signs up- so they can each access their own account of the software with their own database of whatever websites they want to enter into the software(in other words just how every cloud software works).
My question is definitely a newb one, but basically I want to know, what technology is used to do this? What kind of program/service/code is used to add simple "user account functionality to a basic cloud software?
P.S. I would ask the guy who made it but he took my money and ran after making a a piece of junk.
The way that this is done is to modify the PHP to add a login feature. There is unlikely to be an out of the box solution that will work. Rather than having to create a new database every time someone signs up, you would modify the existing database to add a user column to each table, and then update the code to only display the data for the currently logged in user.
Unless you want to spend a few months learning PHP and whatever database you are using, you're going to want to hire another programmer to do this for you. Someone good would charge $200-300 for this. Or you can try taking the lowest bidder for $50 or so, and hope they don't run off too.

Sound notification push direct to my users

This question is not a 'do it for me question' I have spend ages and ages on google trying to find a solution or service
I am basically trying to create a notification on my website that I can push to the server and play to my users as and when I need to alert them,
I have a website where my users will react when I have posted information and I need to alert them with sound increasing their reaction time.
Im using a Joomla 3.2.3 based website
This is previously dicussed here and here
I think it is probably most viable to write an ajax-based module that query the server every X seconds, and pop up notifications if there are any. Using websockets is probably a lot more work,
regards Jonas

How to Automate SMS from PHP mysql at Particular point of Time

I have a website where people will book for Site visits.The Support Executive Confirms Site visit in the previous day. Once the Site visit is confirmed on the day on which site visit should happen the customer should receive SMS in morning telling that you have site visit today as requested.
I have Third party SMS Service
Now I Should Run a Code in PHP, MySQL which sends a SMS in the morning on which the site visit should happen
How can I Do that
Cron -> starts PHP-Script , PHP Script reads records from the SQL Table and checks if an SMS has to be sent, i assume its sms over mail, so you can use the integrated php function to send out mails to the sms gateway. For the guy confirming the visits, create another site with proper authentication where he can access the table and agree with the site-visits and anotherone for the customer to register for site visits
You need a cron job set to run in morning which will call your php file have code for looking in database for customers you need to send sms to.
Yo need to register to sum sms gateway provide 2 good one i know is clickatell and eztexting.
You can get there api for sending sms in there website.
Happy Smsing :D
Set a Cron Jobs in your Control panel.Try this link
http://www.devx.com/DevX/Article/39900/1954
If you would like to try an entirely different approach, check out:
Sent.ly - http://sent.ly
I am the founder of Sent.ly and thought maybe Sent.ly could help you out...
Sent.ly allows you to use an Android phone as an SMS gateway. So... you could just purchase a cheap Android phone ($150 or so) and set up Sent.ly on it and put a SIM in the phone.
By calling the Sent.ly API, the SMS would go out through the SIM in your Android phone. Sent.ly also has the option for scheduling an SMS for sending later which is your use case.
This also allows your PHP application to RECEIVE SMS in addition to just sending it out.
You can setup rules and if an incoming message matches a rule, it would be posted to a PHP page of your choice.
Since I am a great fan of stackoverflow, I would like to invite you to try Sent.ly. We would be happy to set you up with extra credits if you like. Just mail us at support#sent.ly
Cheers,
Varun
I have developed a system like this for use with some of my clients, and you can easily use it to integrate with your website or applications, through HTTP POST or WebServices (using PHP, C# or whatever).
If you are interested just leave an email or other contact information as a reply to this answer and I will gladly send you a sample code of how to send SMS, setting the desired time for sending messages, beyond other things, through our system.
You will not need to have any kind of cron knowledge and setup, it is all handled by our system, and the code is pretty simple and straight forward. You will only need to call our services upon site visit confirmation, setting the desired message sending time, and our system will do the rest.
Best regards.

Email notifications for when events align with location. How?

I am looking at building a webapp in php/mysql that people can log into, and sign up to receive email notifications when a certain event is at their chosen location, e.g a jack johnson concert in new zealand, receivng a notification when he comes to that location to perform. I am guessing that there is some online concert database that apps like shazam use that i could intergrate with.
Any help on building this sort of app would be appreciated, most importantly the notification system and how that integrates with another concert database and the users details .
I have a basic knowledge of php/mysql, I'm guessing I should use a framewok for this, if anyone knows one useful for this task that would be appreciated too.
Thankyou!
Always check ProgrammableWeb when looking fr APIs. I found the Gruvr API:
Gruvr offers tons of geocoded concert data, with about 170K upcoming
shows for 45K bands currently listed. You can ask for upcoming
concerts by location or by band. The results can be returned as
geoRSS, KML, or dynamic map links.
For triggering events, checkout momentapp, which lets you schedule delayed HTTP requests.
Maybe you could start from there. What you could do is when somebody signs up with their location, check Gruvr if there are any upcoming concerts in their area, then schedule a request with momentapp which will trigger your email notification script at a specified time before the event to alert the user.
You can also use CRON as an alternative to using a 3rd-party service like momentapp.
I think your question can be broken down into more questions.

Best method to send programmed emails from web application

I want to send emails through a web app, for example, reminders of a tasks manager, reminders of birthdays... I want to program a date and an hour, and get the email sent at that moment.
I think I have two options to do this: using cron or sending email with a future timestamp.
Using cron involve to run a command (which will query the database) each one, two o five minutes to check if there are any email to be sent. Or, another way, when I save a new reminder, put a new crontab task (via execute a system command from the web app) at the time indicated. With the first option, I think the server load will be excessive. With second option, I'll have hundreds of crontab tasks, what looks dirty for me.
Perhaps I could send the email at the very moment of creating the reminder, but changing the email timestamp to a date and hour in the future. I know some email servers can manage this (like Mercur for Windows), but, is it a standard? I will use my Gmail account to do this job. And, with this solution, I won't be able to cancel a reminder, because the email has been sent at the moment I created the reminder.
I can use PHP or Ruby (RoR) for server language, so the language isn't important, because both of them can send emails and call system commands. If the solution entails scripting, I can use bash scripts, Perl, Python... (the server is a Linux box).
Which do you think is the best method to accomplish the solution to this problem?
I apologize for my poor english. Thanks in advance.
I don't know if you've looked into this, but since you use GMail I thought you might be interested. Google Calendar has this feature:
Go into GMail.
At the top, click on "Calendar".
On the left is a list of calendars. Each has a small link called "Settings". Follow this link (you may want to create a new calendar for this project).
This brings up a tabbed interface. I think it always brings you to the "Calendars" tab, but if it doesn't, click that tab.
Each of the calendars will have a link next to it called, "Notifications". Click the link for the calendar you want to notify you.
This will bring up a list of settings which you can use to set up notifications by sending an email.
Google's API should allow you to access the calendar to sync it with your application. If it's set to send you an email, it will handle all the email for you.
instead of having a cron job for each reminder (or notification, whatever), you might write everything in a file and periodically (for example every 5 minutes) call a script (e.g. php-script) that reads the file and checks whether to send a notification or not...
you would have the functionality without needing to create a cron-job for every item...
would that be a solution?
regards
Having a cron is a better option then sending out emails with future date stamp. Set a cron to run on periodically and it can send out emails.
We have similar questions.
Sending mass email using PHP
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/215736/how-do-i-send-bulk-mail-to-my-users-in-a-generic-fashion
Read those you will get some ideas.

Categories