Schedule the future publishing of items?

PHP
1

I’m developing a small PHP CMS and I want to be able to schedule news items and the like for future dates and automatically post them when that date is due. Would I just include a check script in my header whenever a page is loaded to check for scheduled posts in the database and set them to publish now?

That’s the only way I can think of doing it but that seems like it would be somewhat resource intensive.

2

Or just store a Publish Date in your database, and have your news page query for entries WHERE publish_date < CURRENT_DATE …

3

Or store a series of events in an array with post_id in the database and have it check that one entry instead?

4

So you’re suggesting:

Select Array-Object from Database
Extract Array-Object into Array
Foreach Array as Item
If Item is date-valid
Update news table (or insert)
endif
endforeach
Select news items

is more efficient than

Select news items with WHERE clause

… ok. I beg to differ, but do things however you want.

5

QFT. This is by far the easiest and best way to solve this.

6

Well when you say it like that…

Wouldn’t having to search through all the posts each load be inefficient though? I can’t claim to understand how PHP and SQL loads work. I guess you’d have to keep a timer somewhere to prevent the process running more than once a minute.

7

Well the Database guys could weigh in on this a lot better than I can, but… no. Inefficient would be 4 (or 5) queries instead of 1. (SELECT, UPDATE or [INSERT,DELETE], SELECT, UPDATE vs SELECT). The ‘extra load’ of the database engine having to do a date-based result-restriction would not equate to the processing calls for multiple queries…

@r937? @guido2004? Beuller?

8

Right OK, that makes sense.

9

It seems like a normal query to me. And certainly more efficient than the array solution.
If you’re expecting so much traffic that it might become too big a burden on your server then you might want to look into a catching system.

10

Or, you could just set up a MySQL event (similar to a cron) to do it. You wouldn’t even need to use PHP. Just set the event to run once a day and change published = 0 to published = 1 for articles matching the timestamp specifications.

See: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/create-event.html