I am a relative novice when it comes to cron jobs, so I was hoping someone with more experience could help.
I want to set up a cron job that will automatically rebuild a site every night. Can this be done? I've set one that triggers the rebuild site file in the tools folder. Is this the way to go?
Reported on Movable Type 4.2
If that doesn't work for you, you can always try to create a cron job around the mt-rebuild script (do a Google search for it). I use that to rebuild certain parts of my blog every midnight.
Thanks. And that was fast, too. I'm still having trouble getting the syntax right to get it to run, but that's a support problem to take to my Web host.
Why would you want to rebuild the entire site every night? I don't know your use, but there's almost always a better way to keep things updated.
It's mainly to shift around content with opening and closing date fields on a couple of calendar-type pages. I also have some things built into pages that don't seem to reliably update without a full rebuild. Also, I'm building the site for someone who's not an Internet gearhead, and I'd rather her not have to think about site rebuilds. Plus, it's a small site.
To me it's just the most fail-safe solution to the problem at hand.
Tho, if you have suggestions, throw them my way.
Could you be a lot more specific about what is not refreshing and what settings you have for those modules?
Having pages that aren't reliably updating seems like an actual problem, whereas just wanting to make things simple requires appropriate use of tempalte module caching, includes, and the publishing queue.
I'm wandering off into the weeds a little more than I cared to, but I'm always up for simpler ways to do things if they are out there. There's three pages that have to referesh every night because they have date-sensitive items.
Other portions of the site are gallery pages for an artists portfolio arranged like a flipbook, and the links between them are built with an "if" loop. In addition, the pages have a drop-down menu with a link to the gallery. This is a dynamic link generated by an mt:entries call that generates the latest entry's permalink.
See here:
http://www.avfreeman.com/anna/2008/12/entry-one.html
The site's still under development, so don't judge harshly. The upshot is that that these links always have to be right or the site falls apart. The galleries link has to change on every single page when an entry is added. I'm looking at a nightly rebuild as backstop against failure.