Setup Your Personal Reminder System Using PHP - Final Destination

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Now that we have built all 3 the scripts required for the Reminder System, I am sure that you would be thinking one question; how will these scripts actually send us reminder mails?

Well, good question, up till here it was pretty much standard PHP coding, but how in the world will the script remind us when the event arrives? Well for that we use the services of CRON Jobs (*nix) or Scheduled Events (Windows). In case you have one of the popular servers which employ Cpanel, CpanelX, Plesk, etc then you will find user-friendly tools within their interface to setup Cron Jobs.

If you have the access to setup CRON Jobs or Scheduler Events then you can easily setup an event that would run once in a day preferably at midnight using the following command:

php /ABSOULTE/PATH/TO/reminder_send.php

The above command will execute reminder_send.php using the command line.

Note: /ABSOLUTE/PATH/TO corresponds to the absolute path to the directory on your server where you would store your reminder-system files. 

E.g. /home/devarticles/public_html/reminders/

In case you do not have access to any of the scheduling utilities, then in that case there is another alternative. You can embed the inclusion of reminder_send.php in any of your other working PHP scripts but with one prerequisite, it should be at least that popular that it executes at least once in day. Otherwise whenever the script will be executed it will send out all old reminder events too which might not be of use if the trigger date has already been passed.

Either way here is how you can use this alternate option, add the following code in any of your .php files before starting its output,

include("relative/path/to/reminder_send.php");

Note: relative/path/to corresponds to the relative path to the directory where you would store your reminder-system files. E.g. ../reminders/

As our script reminder_send.php doesn’t produce any output therefore it won’t change the working or the output of your parent script which you use to include it.

Tip: For a tutorial on how to setup Cron jobs via Shell, visit: 

• http://www.albinator.com/manual/installation.php
  
• http://www.sitepoint.com/article/1196

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