SMF Mod for Scheduled Posting

[humbleworld]

I would love to see a MOD that allows us to schedule a post on SMF-powered forum. I know this feature is available in Wordpress and Blogger. Could we have the same in SMF?

[JBlaze]

Things that we would need to know:

1) 1.1.10 or 2.0? If it is for 1.1.10, then it would take alot more work to make it...
2) What options should the post have?
3) What should the post contain and how often should it be posted?

[humbleworld]

1. Version 2.0 since we are moving to that path anyway.
2. Options: we can choose the month, day, year, hour and minute when a thread would be posted.
3. The post is purely text (like an ordinary thread start) and should be posted just once when the time of posting indicated comes.

I think this would be very useful to forum admins who plan to go offline for a long time. This way forums would still have fresh threads even if the admin goes offline. Of course, the are many benefits that this MOD can bring to the community that others here might point out later.

[Arantor]

Future posting does sound like fun. Even been on my to-do list a while.

[humbleworld]

I think VBulletin doesn't have this kind of feature. Correct me if I'm wrong on this.

[Arantor]

I have to be honest, I don't build features because platform <X> does or doesn't. I build them because they'll be useful and cool.

This is on my todo list and where I'm on hiatus from team duties I'll be picking up my mod queue once all my current mods work correctly on 2.0 RC2.

[humbleworld]

Thanks Arantor. Many will love this MOD. That I am sure.

[Liam.]

Thanks Arantor. Many will love this MOD. That I am sure.

Yes, I sure will. On my site when I tell staff to post atleast an article a week, as close to a specific time as possible; this will be great.

[Skoen]

I would definitely love to see this mod available as well, although I'm using 1.10.

[Arantor]

As/when I get round to it I won't be doing a 1.1 version, sorry.

[humbleworld]

Yes, it should be released for the latest version of SMF.

[CultureGlue]

I can't wait for this mod

[KensonPlays]

Me neither! Even tho I am on my site often...

[vbgamer45]

Wouldn't be hard to do If no one works on by end of Jan I might make one kind of cool. SMF 2.0 has scheduled tasks so it should be a piece of cake.

[CultureGlue]

I heard it would be much far easier in 2.0

[KensonPlays]

That is what he said he would do it in!

[MARRR]

I WAS KIND OF HOPING TO HAVE IT AVAILABLE FOR VERSION 1.1.11

[JBlaze]

I WAS KIND OF HOPING TO HAVE IT AVAILABLE FOR VERSION 1.1.11

Good luck with that. Cron jobs ftl

[Arantor]

I WAS KIND OF HOPING TO HAVE IT AVAILABLE FOR VERSION 1.1.11

Sorry, I couldn't hear you...

[PopUpSteve]

Anything every become of this? It still would be a great MOD.

[vbgamer45]

I built it
http://www.smfhacks.com/hacks/Post-Scheduler.html

[PopUpSteve]

Great, thanks, I'll give it a try.

[PopUpSteve]

Wow, works great.

If I may make a suggestion. It would be nice to have an "Expire" option. That way the topic can be automatically delete.

[PopUpSteve]

Did find one possible bug. I had scheduled two new topics to be created on the same day/time. I created three copies of each of the topics. I will see if this happens if there are scheduled on the same day but a minute apart.

[PopUpSteve]

Had to uninstall the mod

It appears to have been generating 1000s of errors in our server logs and was causing some problem with the server where I then could not access the following Admin Functions:

• Core Features
• Features and Options
• Security and Moderation
• Languages
• Server Settings
• Modification Settings
• Tapatalk Settings
• Posts and Topics
• Configuration
• Mail

[vbgamer45]

What were the errors?

[humbleworld]

Thank  you vbgamer for making this MOD. I hope more would give their feedback about this MOD.

[vbgamer45]

Too bad never got approved on the mod site

[PopUpSteve]

What were the errors?

Sorry, I did not copy the errors. My Server Admin informed me of the errors and I opted to uninstall the mod.

[humbleworld]

Why was it not approved, vbgamer? Were there too many errors? Is this MOD stable and compatible with 2.0.2?

[vbgamer45]

No idea too many hoops to go though so gave up but you can download from my personal site at smfhacks.com works fine.

[humbleworld]

well, if it does not break our forum site, maybe worth trying it. i'm excited about this MOD.

[emanuele]

Too bad never got approved on the mod site

You never updated it as far as I can see.

[diesy]

Hello,

I am trying out this mod. It seems promising, however I cannot figure out if I can set permissions for other membergroups to be able to schedule posts?

Currently, only I as an admin can see the option.

Any help?

[vbgamer45]

Only admins can use it.

[ryan_dwight]

Is there any other mod with the same/similar feature like this?

[Gwenwyfar]

Aww, its a shame you gave up :/

Would you mind if it was updated/modified by someone else? So someone else could continue with it at least.

I found it pretty neat, specially since my forum has a couple posts every week that need to be posted at the same time, for weekly competitions, and other very useful things to do with it, but it doesn't work very well. It only posts if you go to the /cronpost.php page (which means it gets a tad pointless...), and sometimes it gives an error when trying to access one of the admin pages. Same thing needing to access the cronpost.php with either fake jobs on or off. Also the new post doesn't show up on index.

[margarett]

It is actually under review again by our team

[Gwenwyfar]

Oh, that's nice to hear, will be waiting for it!

Tested now to see if I didn't do anything wrong and you were actually supposed to use /cronpost.php before so it could start the schedule, but nope, it posts things before the given time if you do that.

[vbgamer45]

Hmm it shouldn't the cronpost.php should be called by cron job if using SMF 1.1.x for SMF 2.0.x it should use the built in SMF  task scheduler.

[Gwenwyfar]

You think it didn't install properly then? (or some conflict) Under the post lists it shows "Cron Job Url:  http://mydomain.com/cronpost.php"

And if I go to that link all it shows me is "Post Scheduler", and activates any listed scheduled posts.

(SMF version is 2.0.8 )

[vbgamer45]

What about smf scheduled tasks?

[Gwenwyfar]

Hmm, I think the fault was mine on this. I thought it wouldn't make much difference between a post and a topic, I had tested with new posts before. For topics its works well enough For a topic it does add the post to the tasks area as expected. I take it the smf tasks themselves rely on someone loading a page?

Hope its not too hard to fix this, would make this mod just perfect if it worked for posts as well And thanks for making it on the first place!

Edit: Perhaps I just didn't understand how it actually works. It just checks for posts once every hour and if there is any it adds during that hour? The post (not new topic) I added for test this time went fine, too. Just doesn't work for smaller time differences then if that's the case.

[Gwenwyfar]

And in case you want a translation for this (or anyone else), I made one for Portuguese (attached file)