Event Calendar not sending reminders

I am a novice, a complete layman, worse than a newb. I love Event Calendar except it is not sending out the set reminders. I'm not getting any error messages just no reminders. 

  • I guess it has something to do with Cron Jobs. I notice that in the utility tab it says no cron job has ever been executed. Is this something that I was supposed to know how to manually setup at ELGG installation or should it have occurred naturally? I have the message que plugin as specified. I know where the ADD CRON JOB utility is on my Cpanel but I have no idea how to create one.

    I am totally lost

    If you can help it would be greatly appreciated.

  • Rvr I read it before I posted. Still have no idea how to author the code, where to put it on my server. Unfortunately there were a few hundred calendar entries entered before any of us knew that it wasn't sending out notifications. I assumed that the plugin would either tell exactly where and how to place a cron job or say that one should not use it without prior knowledge. I see that that was a poor assumption made partially because of the relative ease of WordPress plugins that did everything themselves.I was spoiled.

    I think I may have to lose all that data and try a different social network with an easy to configure calendar. Mea culpa

  • The cronjobs are not only to be configured for the Event Calendar plugin but for Elgg itself. That's the reason the configuration is not specifically mentioned in the Event Calendar readme as I just assumed that the Elgg documentation would be used to make the initial configuration of the cronjobs which are to be configured on the server and this could be different on each server depending on its configuration. If you're lost you might want to ask the support of your webhoster how to generally set up cronjobs. With this knowledge the addition of the Elgg-specific jobs should be not too difficult following the instructions in the Elgg documentation.

    I doubt very much that setting up cronjobs is any different in Wordpress or any other CMS because it's just the same server configuration necessary in any case. It might just be different when only using pseudo "cronjobs" that are not triggered by the server clock on time but by other means (like user interaction) to emulate the cronjobs.

    Elgg also has a poor-man cronjob plugin: https://elgg.org/plugins/2512029. With this plugin in use you wouldn't have to add cronjobs on the server. But it requires a user on your site doing something (like loading some page) to get the cronjobs triggered. This is no problem with at least one user online at any/most of the time. But without any kind of user actions the jobs registered for the cron intervals won't get triggered on time but only the next time some user is available.

  • I see the Add Cron Job utility in my cPanel. If I choose the twice daily option AND insert the correct command will it work? If so what is the path or command? My Webhosting folks say that they can't help install plugins. Thank you for trying to help me. I have a screenshot but have no idea ho to upload it to this forum. 

  • I installed the poor man's cron figuring that I can at least guarantee the reminders get sent by manually going on the site. However I then got this. I then deactivated message que, removed it thorugh file manager, reinstalled it and still get this. Even if I deactivate the poor man's cron I get this. So it seems I have made the problem worse. This is a bit nightmarish.I guess now even if I figure out what goes in the command line to add a cron job that it is irrelevant since the messge que appears to be fried. 

    message_queue (guid: 411) cannot start and has been deactivated. Reason: Cannot include start.php for plugin message_queue (guid: 411) at /home/homegard/public_html/elgg2/mod/message_queue.

     

  • Shouldn't the cron job have been activated or installed or whatever when ELGG installed? 

  • Image upload to the site here is not possible.

    Deleting a plugin folder from the mod directory on your server without deactivating the plugin first would result in the error. But dismissing the error message should be enough to not getting the error message to show up again.

    If you delete / move / re-install a plugin on your server you need to make sure that any files and folders newly added have the correct owner and permissions (without seeing the images I might give some totally off-topic advice though). For the sending of the reminders to work you need to make sure that all relevant plugins are installed and activated and that you have installed the correct version of the plugins (as recommended for your version of Elgg).

    The cron daemon is provided by the server - or not. It absolutely impossible for Elgg to make use of the cron daemon automatically as there are 1000s of different configuration scenarios possible depending on how the server is set up, the tools available, restrictions by hosting plans etc. etc. In most cases (e.g. with CPanel) the cronjobs would have to be added in a way the Elgg installation has no access to anyway. It's really not difficult if your webhoster allows it to set up the cronjobs. They do nothing else but visiting a certain url of your Elgg site (for example using the tool wget or lwp-request) at certain intervals. Elgg notices these visits and then triggered the jobs registered for the corresponding interval.

    I just saw that the instructions for Elgg 3 as linked above might be a bit too brief. For Elgg 2 the instructions are at http://learn.elgg.org/en/2.3/admin/cron.html and this would still work in Elgg 3, too. But on a server your might probably not edit the crontab file anyway but add cronjobs for example in CPanel. There you would just add a job configuring the interval (or selecting one of the pre-defined) and provide the corresponding command to be executed by the job, e.g.

    /usr/bin/lwp-request -m GET -d https://yoursite.url/cron/minute/ >/dev/null 2>&1

    for the 1 minute cronjob (and for any other interval only the url would have to be modified accordingly). If lwp-request is available you might need to change the path to this command but otherwise it should work.

    All this cron daemon setup work is just one way (recommended because reliable way). If you use the crontrigger plugin you wouldn't have to do it this way at all. But then you would have to get it smoothly working with crontrigger without errors showing up (which I can't help much right now without knowing the full error messages).

  • I just found the images on your site. They show the CPanel cron module I was talking about. You don't have to enter any Event Calendar specific commands. There are only the Elgg core cronjobs necessary (and plugin can hook into these whenever necessary). For the Elgg core cronjobs I gave you an example in my last posting and the other intervals are fiveminute, fifteenmin, halfhour, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, yearly.