hi guys,

 

I wonder if you can help.

 

I have a website where Financial Advisers log in to a session and can view their clients that we have done business for (we are a financial adviser firm too) - our database is mysql and our pages are php.

 

I'm trying to work out a way so that when they log in and see their client list, they can also click on a client and find the status/progress for new clients (we usually transfer a client from one pension scheme to another).

 

At the moment we're emailing them once a week with a text update. I wonder if there's a way we can update the site (more often) and have a more 'live' feel to the update process.

 

I've seen the term 'cron job' about, but I have zero experience with that

 

please help! thanks

hi guys,

 

I wonder if you can help.

 

I have a website where Financial Advisers log in to a session and can view their clients that we have done business for (we are a financial adviser firm too) - our database is mysql and our pages are php.

 

I'm trying to work out a way so that when they log in and see their client list, they can also click on a client and find the status/progress for new clients (we usually transfer a client from one pension scheme to another).

 

At the moment we're emailing them once a week with a text update. I wonder if there's a way we can update the site (more often) and have a more 'live' feel to the update process.

 

I've seen the term 'cron job' about, but I have zero experience with that

 

please help! thanks

 

Maybe you should consider outsourcing this project to a professional developer if you don't have as much experience

Maybe you should consider outsourcing this project to a professional developer if you don't have as much experience

 

because there's no budget for it.

 

Am i right about Cron Jobs? Is it possible (or the right way!) for the admin team to write update notes on a text file, then somehow upload it to a web template?

A cron job is just a scheduled command that will execute at a given time, so yes you could use this to send email updates, providing it had an appropriate script.

 

I wrote an alerts system for a council that sent out email alerts to council employees using a cron job. The cron ran every 5 minutes and it was basically checking a database to see if there were any pending alerts in a database table. Each item in the database queue table had a send date, so if the current time was past the send date it would send that email then remove the email from the queue. The email content was generated on the fly depending on what type of email it was. Each email 'type' corresponded to an object which implemented a common queue interface, that way their developers can easily add new alert types. Each object had a hook function which was called after the email was sent, so that the alert could feed back into the queue if it was a recurring email, subscription, digest, etc.

 

In practice, if you're only sending one alert type at a fixed time every week, you could probably get away with just a simple script that would select all client status updates from the database where client belongs to subscriber then send any updates as an email.

A cron job is just a scheduled command that will execute at a given time, so yes you could use this to send email updates, providing it had an appropriate script.

 

I wrote an alerts system for a council that sent out email alerts to council employees using a cron job. The cron ran every 5 minutes and it was basically checking a database to see if there were any pending alerts in a database table. Each item in the database queue table had a send date, so if the current time was past the send date it would send that email then remove the email from the queue. The email content was generated on the fly depending on what type of email it was. Each email 'type' corresponded to an object which implemented a common queue interface, that way their developers can easily add new alert types. Each object had a hook function which was called after the email was sent, so that the alert could feed back into the queue if it was a recurring email, subscription, digest, etc.

 

In practice, if you're only sending one alert type at a fixed time every week, you could probably get away with just a simple script that would select all client status updates from the database where client belongs to subscriber then send any updates as an email.

 

that's not quite what i'm asking.

 

The current system is the admin staff use Business Contact Manager to make notes, then at the end of each week I send an email using BCM's mass email feature - which in turn populates a Publisher template, using it's mail merge.

 

However, the new system i'd like to implement is that the admin staff somehow update to our website. So when a user logs in (which is already in place) they can click on a client and view the update (that would previously have been sent by email) online, updated live when the admin staff make the update.

 

thanks

I dont know anything about Business Contact Manager but I looked it up on google and apparently it has an API - http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/bb267896.aspx I don't know how easy it would be to integrate that with PHP though. It appears to have an export to CSV function which if you could somehow automate to upload the CSV to your web server then you could use a cron job to scan the directory for new files, which it could parse into your mysql db.