I'd like to be able to write plugins that fire on a cron job. I've already got my crontab set up to [url=http://isaacschlueter.com/admin/b2antispam_poll.php]update my blacklist[/url] and [url=http://isaacschlueter.com/admin/b2antispam_recheck.php]recheck the un-rechecked spammers[/url]. We're [url=http://forums.b2evolution.net/viewtopic.php?t=4512]working on figuring out the best algorithm for a .htaccess-creating script[/url], as well, that could be run oncron as well.
It could work something like this:
[list]
Have a file that you tell the user to point their crontab at. This file could also be run from the URL (if you're doing it every hour or whatever, who cares if someone else initiates it?) That way, users without cron on their server could still have certain utilities that they run on a regular basis from a bookmark or something.[*]This means that nothing secure should EVER go in a cron plugin. Also, the output should be super-basic text so that when it emails it to you, i'ts not cluttered with lots of HTML. It shouldn't do anything that you don't want it doing over and over again on a regular basis (deleting posts, etc.)[*]When you install a plugin for the OnCron event, it gets added to the cron script, and runs whenever it is called.[/list:u]
Other ideas for cronnable plugins, besides antispam/blacklist stuff:
[list][*]Perform pings/tbs for published posts that haven't been pinged yet.[*]Close comments on old posts.[*]getmail.php[*]Trim the blacklist to remove unnecessary entries[*]Validate HTML/CSS of output pages and raise an alert if errors are found.[*]Check links on all pages and raise an alert if a broken link is found.[/list:u]
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For that, users can use a webcron like [url=http://www.webcron.org/click.php?ref=slamp]http://webcron.org[/url].
Hope it helps,
Slamp