Cross-post from koudal.dk

I have a couple of sites where I use FeedWordPress to aggregate several feeds into one.

No Cron?

If you do not have cron-facilities at your hosting source, you have a bit of a conundrum. The latest version of WordPress (at the time of writing this) 2.1, have built in WP-cron facilities now, but it is extremely terribly documented, and apart from the developers, no-one really seems to know how to use the functionality.

With the lack of cron-support on our host, we would have to go to the manual update file a couple of era per day, and that would be annoying even by the end of the day. (Trust me on this).

http://www.yoursite.com/wp-content/update-feeds.php

Here is the fix

This small hack involves a bit of editing of the update-feeds.php file in your wp-content/-folder, and then subscribing to www.WebCron.org. Its free, and it gives you the option to run specific urls every hour, or but you want to time it.

Webcron allows you to do tasks at set hours by looking for a page on your website.

The system allows you to enter a username and password, which would prevent improper use of the system, but it does not word with the FWP update script. The webcron service uses GET to contact the url, and FWP accepts only POSTs.

Our first task is to make sure the script is not forwarded to the login page. Open up your editor, and load the update-feeds.php file.

Now, we do want to ensure that the script can still talk to the WP backend, so we do not want to remove the login check, but simply by-pass it by count the variables above the check function, with the assess values, like this: 

It could be seen as a infringement of wellbeing to place your login and password in the .php file, but who is going to be looking at it? Only people who already have access to your FTP, thats who.

We now have secured that the script is always logged in, and ready to converse with the WordPress backend. But the script usually requires an layer of interactivity, where you as the user select which feeds (if not all) to update from a pulldown.

Here is where some additional editing comes into play. You simply add the variable to the beginning of the script, like this:

$_POST['update']='silent'; would work as well, but I left the verbose option here for debugging, and here is no reason to not leave it here. 

Here you have it. Its not a wonderful hack in its layout, but its effective. I wish the functionality of automated tasks were more better documented, so here would be no need for hacks like this, editing source .php-files and relying on 3rd party homepages.

I hope you like the ploy, and please leave a comment.

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