Cron job

Recently I had to set up a cron job for Jomsocial. The site is for a school and I am working for this site on volunteer base. The site is built on Joomla, XAMPP and 2003 Windows server.

I tried a windows scheduled task but it does not work by some reasons. I tried Joomla extension jCron, but it does not work either in this situation. I downloaded a program called "Cron for windows". But it is not free.

I set up the scheduled task on my laptop and it works, but it must work 24 hrs everyday. So I abandoned this idea.

Then I thought it can be done online. I found two free online services and I am using http://www.setcronjob.com/ . This works great and easy to set up. It works for every 5 minutes to any schedule.
The other one is http://www.onlinecronjobs.com/, but this allows only once a day and up to 5 cronjobs.

For my particular case, I just need to paste the Jomsocial cron job URL to "URL to call" in www.setcronjob.com
e.g. http://www.mywebsite/index.php?option=com_community&task=cron

You need to replace www.mywebsite to yours.

The following links are my other collections during this research.

Cron for windows
Configuring cron jobs on Windows from Drupal, using Firefox.
Joomla plugin Jcron.


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Setting up Cronjob for Jomsocial with Jcron in XAMPP

I was working on my Jomsocial and it needs a cronjob.
Unless you set up a cronjob it does not send any email notices in Jomsocial. For example notice for Friend request, Group bulletins, private messages.
My set up is Joomla on XAMPP. If you are using the same, this article may help.


First you need to open C:\xampp\htdocs\JOOMLA\components\com_community\cronjob.php and change the hosting and subfolder.

Install Jcron.
I found this forum and this screen shot which explains the set up for Jcron.
The screenshot will tell you how to set up a cronjob in Jcron.

My template needed a writable permission and the site was running on XAMPP.
Windows does not have chmod, so I right click the file "mytemplate.php" in explorer in the server and removed the "read only" attribute.

Then going back to Joomla back end > component > JCron > Configuration to run "Enable CRON RUN".

Jcron does the job when someone visit your website or click a menu.
However I thought I need to set up a server side cron job as well.

Going back to Windows server to set up a scheduled task. All programs > Accessories > System tools > scheduled tasks.
I set up every 30min from 7AM for 12 hours everyday.


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