I've been working on a process to automatically update RSS feed entries via a combo of 2 cron job commands, reFeed Lite, mt-rebuild, and MultiBlog (to update the index.html page). However, everything seems to be working fine except the last step (using MultiBlog to update index.html). I had been delaying asking the community for help on this until I tried everything I could think of, but I'm stuck. Here's a summary of the setup and desired steps:
- Under MT 5.02 (with patch update for background publishing issue), I have a shell site [blog1], with a sub-directory blog [blog2] designed to aggregate RSS feed entries from 3 sources; MultiBlog then used on blog1 to draw blog2's RSS feed entry titles and summaries into a column on blog1's index.html page. A cron job with 2 commands (one executing the feed request from the 3 external feed sources at the top of every hour, and the other imploring mt-rebuild to execute a publish command on all blogs) is set up to execute background commands. The index.html, archives.html and atom.xml files on both blogs have been set up to publish via Publish Queue. The MultiBlog default arguments on blog1 include both blog IDs. The Rebuild triggers on both blog1 and blog2 are "When All websites and blogs in this system publishes an entry/page rebuild indexes."
Everything seems to work fine until it's time for MultiBlog to feed the latest blog2 headlines into the blog1 column. The cron job acquires new RSS feed items (if there are new ones since the previous hour) and mt-rebuild saves and publishes the new entries. A refresh of the blog2 index.html page confirms this. However, no amount of refreshing the blog1 index.html page updates the blog1 column with the newest blog2 entry titles and summaries. I have to do a "hard" publish of blog2, then a hard publish of blog1, and then wait for several minutes before a page refresh enables the new titles and summaries to show up on blog1. (A refresh immediately after a hard publish of both blogs still doesn't bring up anything new. I'm thinking this has something to do with a conflict of both cron commands executing at the same time, but that's just a guess.
Any idea why this background process might be halting right before the last step? Competing background queue commands? Something else? TIA
Reported on Movable Type 5
Sad sign of the times for me with the Movable Type world . . . 2 years ago, this topic might have generated dozens of responses. Now it's more likely that spam for good quality guitars and skilled trades and services in South Florida get posted first.