Category: Notes (Page 27 of 50)

Last year, I shared how to properly setup a WordPress cron job in which I walked through the process of defining a cron job in the operating system so that a job fires as a true scheduled task (rather than the faux tasks that WordPress provides).

This isn’t to say that the native WordPress scheduled tasks are bad – they just may not work as expected for those who are used to native cron jobs.

Another limitation of the the WordPress scheduling system is that it defines only a handful of intervals in which your tasks may run. These include:

• `hourly`
• `daily`
• `twicedaily`

And these are fine for a lot of tasks, but if you’re looking to define a new WordPress cron schedule, you’ll need to define a custom filter.

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When it comes to sending emails in WordPress, the wp_mail function and its related filters such as wp_mail_content_type, wp_mail_from, and wp_mail_from_name are usually enough to accomplish the majority of what we need.

But there are times where it’s not enough. Specifically, there are times where we may need to define the details for using a custom SMTP server in WordPress.

Fortunately, WordPress provides a hook that makes this really easy to do.

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One of the most powerful aspects of the WordPress API is WP_Query as it allows us to retrieve a wide variety of content through a relatively simple interface.

That is, it allows us to retrieve complicated datasets ranging from custom post types, post status, date ranges, taxonomies, meta data, categories, and so on all with a relatively standard set of PHP constructs (mainly arrays) and with a really solid reference in the associated Codex article.

One of the nicest things about WP_Query, especially since WordPress 3.7, are the advanced date query parameters that we can use in order to retrieve information from a specific date range without having to do a lot of complicated date math (which, of course, is every programmer’s favorite aspect of development).

If you learn how to use that particular aspect of WP_Query and you’re familiar with PHP’s strtotime function, then you can retrieve posts from a range of dates easily.

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