XF 1.4 Run Feeder cron job manually?

[Postpar Dave]

I have a news system on my site using WordPress and would like to run Feeder manually to collect news when it's posted. I have a WordPress plugin that automatically runs a script whenever a post is made, and it would be easy to hook in a command to run all RSS feeds right away if I knew how the !@$^*! that could be done. I suspect this is easy but I've searched the forums a few times and looked at the cron jobs page and can't figure it out. This would be much more efficient than having a dozen cron jobs running every 10-30 minutes "just in case" and would also get the news out faster (as in, instantly).

I tried looking into deferred.php but can't figure out where the “feeder” script is.

Is this something as easy as I suspect it is?

 

[Paul B]

Which feed are you referring to?

Is this for content being imported into your forum or your forum RSS feeds being displayed on other pages/sites?

 

[Postpar Dave]

Content being imported in via RSS. I tried to find a way to do it via WordPress plugin but did not. At first I just did the main feed but now I have news coming in by category (each category has its own RSS feed) to individual forums. TMI? and thanks for the quick reply. Gosh, I'm not in InvisionLand any more!

 

[Paul B]

How would you know when to run the import based on an external feed being updated with new content?

That's why it is done via a cron task.

 

[Postpar Dave]

Because there's a thingie in WordPress that runs when you post and I am tied into that anyway to generate static "recent news" includes.

 

[Mike]

See the class XenForo_CronEntry_Feeder. That is what is triggered by the cron.

 

[Postpar Dave]

Oh, I see. I can run /directory/library/XenForo/CronEntry/Feeder.php from shell…, right?

Edit: it looks as though I can run that from shell but not from a browser. I am using the Webhooks plugin for WordPress and will see if that works even if I can't do it from a browser (it can essentially hit a URL). If that fails I will see if I can trigger the running of the Feeder.php file from the existing php file I run when a news item is posted.

 

[Mike]

No. The code in question can only be run within the XF framework (once it's started up). You would need to custom develop a script to call the necessary part of the API. (You could base the start up code on deferred.php and then call the necessary method to start the feed import.)

 

[Postpar Dave]

Oh. Dang it. Much more work than I thought it would be. I'll take a look at deferred.php, thanks for the tip.

 

[Postpar Dave]

Gosh, this deferred.php is a small script (to your credit). But I can't figure out what part to hardcode and what part to ignore.

I am guessing I need to hardcode the second line to initialize($fileDir.'./library/Feeder/',$filedir); ?

XenForo_Autoloader::getInstance()->setupAutoloader($fileDir . '/library');
XenForo_Application::initialize($fileDir . '/library', $fileDir);

 

[Mike]

Custom development is really beyond the scope of our official support. If you have any further questions, I'd recommend posting in the development forum.

However, I will say that if you're putting the file in the root XF directory, you can use the code up until (and including):

$dependencies->preLoadData();

Then after it just call:

XenForo_Model::create('XenForo_Model_Feed')->scheduledImportTimeLimited(15);

 

[Postpar Dave]

Thanks. If that fails I will indeed try posting in development. I appreciate your help.

 

[Resolution]

In a similar vein, is it possible to code a cron job to import the contents of an .xls file from an external website into the database?

I've got something working locally which takes a copy of an .xls file stored on someone else's website (using .php fopen/fwrite) , and then read/display the contents (using PHPExcel - Home) but ideally I would have thought it would be better to use XenForo built in code? My code does not seem to work when added into XenForo for some reason.

 

[Mike]

Your best bet may be to post in the development discussions forum with specific questions or problems.