The incredible possibilities offered by the Scheduled Tasks in Joomla

by Marc Dechèvre

Woluweb

Marc

Present slides: https://slides.woluweb.be

This presentation was / will be made at

1 INTRODUCTION

Since version 4.1 (and so also in 5.x series) Joomla introduced a very interesting new feature called Scheduled Tasks. WIth other words with automation

Even though it has been present since 14 Fabruary 2022, everytime I exchange with other Joomlers I realize that the majority has overlooked the power of this feature.

So the goal of this article is to shed some light on the possibilities at the hand of different examples / usecases:

  • some are native Plugins, ready to be used within Joomla
  • some are third-party Plugins, typically open source and available for free on Github
  • and of course the whole idea is that you can also create your own, in order to meet your specific needs

2 Other sources about the Task Scheduler

Quite luckily different people have already produced interesting content about the Task Scheduler.

So let me start by thanking and referencing them:

3 Scheduled Tasks - native Plugins

Go to your backend > System > Scheduled Tasks.

Click on the New button and see what is already natively available in J5:

  • Delete ActionLogs - Task
    Delete Action logs after days
  • Expiration of privacy consents
    Manage the expiration of privacy consents
  • Rotate Logs
    Periodically rotates log files.
  • Task - Session Data Purge
    Task Plugin that purges expired data and metadata depending on the session handler set in Global Configuration.
  • Joomla! Update Notification
    This task periodically checks for the availability of new Joomla! versions. When one is found it will send you an email, reminding you to update. You can customise the email
  • Image Size Check
    Check images, resize if larger than allowed. Attention: The original file will be overwritten!
  • GET Request
    Make GET requests to a server. Supports a custom timeout and authorization headers.
  • Toggle Offline
    Toggles the site’s status on each run.
  • Set Site Online
    Sets site status to online on each run.
  • Set Site Offline
    Sets site status to offline on each run.
  • Global Check-in
    Check in checked out items.

3.1 My favourite ones

My favourite ones are

3.1.1 Global Check-in

Gosh, how many times end-users called me in the last ten years because they were editing from the front-end but some Articles were “checked out” by “accident”, preventing them from opening them. Every time I would have to go to the back-end to “check-in” all Items.

Now I can automate this action every night at 3PM for example

3.1.2 Image Size Check

In many cases you want to have a maximum width or height for images in a given Folder. But even if you make your end-users aware of the importance or resizing (in order to have a better performance for the visitors but also to have smaller backups etc) still people “forget” to resize their images.

Now I can for given Folders automatically resize the images (for example I set a maximum width of 600 pixels for all images in the Newsletter folder)

3.1.3 Get request

For some of my websites, I need to trigger some synchronization thanks to a script which is accessible on a given URL. The Get request does exactly that…

4 Scheduled Tasks - third-party Plugins

4.1 Check-in all your Content in J4

As mentioned above, in Joomla 5 there is a Native Plugin to check-in all your Content. But what is your website is still running J4?

Free - by Tobias Zulauf

See https://github.com/zero-24/plg_task_checkin

4.2 Auto-delete files

What about auto-deleting files older than a certain timeframe in a given folder only (and not its subfolders)

Free - by Tom van der Laan

See https://github.com/TLWebdesignNL/Auto-Delete-Files-Task-Scheduler-Plugin

4.3 Change different Parameters of Articles automatically

What about being able to move Articles to other Categories in function of a certain date (or do similar things)

4.3.1 Kick Manage Article

A Task Scheduler to move articles from some Category to another Category when older than X days, based on the following dates:

  • created
  • modified
  • published
  • unpublished

Free - by KickTemp

See https://github.com/Kicktemp/plg_task_kickmanagearticle

4.3.2 CCC Timewarp

With this plugin, you can

  • move your Articles to a different Category depending on a certain Date
  • change the publication Status
  • adjust the Access Level
  • …

This is particularly useful if you use Joomla Articles to display Events, but also, for example, to make your news only available to a closed circle for x days and only make them public after some time.

NB: on top of the usual Types of Dates, you can also use a Custom Field of Type Date in your conditions, which is handy.

Paid - by Elisa Foltyn

See

4.4 Reset Hits

For a given project where I needed to display “the most popular Films of the month”, I wanted to reset the number of Hits on the 1st day of every month.

In the Configuration you can choose to reset Hits for any of the following:

  • Articles
  • Tags
  • Categories

Free - by Marc Studer and Marc Dechèvre

See https://github.com/woluweb/plg_task_resethits

4.5 Synchronize my Custom Fields with some external Web Service

Yet for another project I needed to synchronize the value of 20 Custom Fields for 300 Articles with the latest data coming from some external Web Service.

Let’s take a practical example: social.brussels is a kind of Directory of all Social Services and Associations in Brussels. You can access the details of each organization:

On the Joomla website there are hundreds of articles having Custom Fields for the Address, Phone number etc.

So the idea was to automate a daily synchronization between the external source and our website so that the end users would not spend hours every month checking whether some information were outdated since last time…

Free - by Dimitris Grammatikogiannis

See https://github.com/dgrammatiko/plg_task_json2cf

4.6 Delete Trashed

With this Task Plugin you can schedule the execution of the Empty Trash task.

Free - by Nicola Galgano

See https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/task-delete-trashed

4.7 TF Auto Update

Two Tasks are available:

  • Update any column in any Joomla! database automatically
  • Delete records from any Joomla database table based on defined rules

Free - by Tech Fry

See https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/tf-auto-update

4.8 Force password reset

This Joomla! task plugin will help You to force users of selected groups to reset their password periodically.

You can set different periods for different users groups.

When task run , user will forced to reset his password after their next login

Paid - by Mishel Naguib

See https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/force-password-reset-task

4.9 Manage Inactive Users

This task plugin will help You to manage inactive users.

Paid - by Mishel Naguib

See https://extensions.joomla.org/extension/manage-inactive-users-task

4.10 Feeding Articles from an external API

It reads an external API (a kind of Job Board) and feeds Joomla Articles of a given Category.

Official description: API interface for Apicodo Dorfapp. Task plugin to import the data time-controlled via the APICODO API. A category must be selected in the plugin to which the data records can be transferred. With each new request, all data records in the category are deleted and rewritten.

Free - by Claudia

https://github.com/coweb01/Master-task_wbcdorfapp

4.11 Executing a query

(Coming soon)

Free - by Oliver Schuldt

4.12 Migrate user profiles to custom fields

This “Scheduled Tasks” plugin migrates the data from the Joomla user profile to Custom Fields. Manually, hourly, according to your specifications.

Free - by Kicktemp

https://kicktemp.shop/produkte/kickprofiletocustomfield

4.13 Extension Updates Notification

This Joomla plugin checks for updates of extensions and sends an eMail once available, the code is based on the core plg_task_updatenotification plugin.

https://github.com/zero-24/plg_task_extensionupdates

Free - by Tobias Zulauf

4.14 JFilters - set automatically the min and max values when using the Range Slider

JFilters is an extension by BlueCoder (Sakis Terzis) allowing to filter your Articles and Contacts using Custom Fields, Categories, Tags and native fields:

https://blue-coder.com/jfilters

In June 2024, JFilters introduced the possibility to filter on a range (for Integers or Dates) which is quite handy. See the details on

https://blue-coder.com/help/blog/how-to-fiilter-using-numerical-and-date-ranges

For this Range (with or without a Slider), in practice you need to manually set a minimum and a maximum value.

At #jd24dach, Elisa Foltyn created a Task plugin which will automatically set these minimum and a maximum values based on the real values met in the corresponding Custom Field.

I have a usecase where this is particularly useful: for a website showing the details of 3000+ movies, I wanted to be able to filter on the Duration of each film. Of course I could have set a theoretical minimum value of 0 and a maximum value of 300 minutes… but thanks to this Task the min and max values are dynamically set based on the real Duration of each of the films.

Free - by Elisa Foltyn (aka Coolcat Creations)

https://github.com/coolcat-creations/plg_task_jfilterrangesliderupdater

4.15 Scheduled Tasks provided directly by some Extensions

As mentioned in the Sources, some extensions provide their own Task Schedulers. Examples:

5 Scheduled Tasks - create your own… and share it!

As you can see from the above-mentioned examples, the sky is the limit: for every need you can invent your own Scheduled Task.

This would be a nice topic for (yet) another article in the Joomla Community Magazine in the coming months: develop different nice usecases for Scheduled Tasks like:

  • connect your website with Zapier or other similar services
  • modify some Custom Field value based on some conditions
  • reset the password of (some) users every n months
  • do some database work (optimizing, …)
  • check and notify for updates
  • check for system modifications (PHP version, execution time, …)
  • interact with your newsletter extension
  • interact with your e-commerce extension (abandoned carts, …)
  • send Push Notifications (OneSignal, …)
  • send SMS (Twillio, …)
  • …

So please share your ideas/suggestions of Scheduled Tasks!

And if you already wrote one, please share the link so that everybody can enjoy…

6 See common parameters

You can get an email notification

  • upon success
  • upon failure

You can enable/disable logs.

Etc.

7 Triggering the tasks

Last but not least:

  • if you only want to run a given Task manually, there is a nice yellow button Run Test to launch it
  • but more generally, Scheduled Tasks need at least 1 triggering method to be active if you wanta automation. There are 3 different triggering methods

See a summary hereafter but you can find more documentation about that here:

7.1 CRON jobs

  • you only need to setup 1 CRON job… and it will process the whole tasks queue (fastest and most efficient)
  • command: /path/to/php /path/to/site/cli/joomla.php scheduler:run --all
  • set the frequence according to your needs (5 minutes for example. Or even every minute if your host allows it)

7.2 Web CRON (a URL)

Note: at the moment the Web CRON only works if you set the ID of a given task. Web CRON will be fully functional with Joomla 5.3. You can follow the topic on https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/pull/43817

  • with your host: still requires to setup a CRON job (wget or curl. Or sometimes via a specific interface of your host)
  • with a third-party service: but can become very expensive
  • to enable, go to System > Manage > Scheduled Tasks > Options. There go to Web Cron tab, Enable it, Save and then a Webcron Link appears, that you can Copy

7.3 Lazy Scheduler (also sometimes called “poor man’s cron”)

  • to enable, go to System > Manage > Scheduled Tasks > Options. There go to Lazy Scheduler tab, Enable it, change maybe the Request Interval (from 300 to 30 for example if you have time-sensitive Tasks) and Save
  • so very easy
  • but be aware:
    • by definition it only triggers when you have visitors. So you can’t predict the execution time (more likely to run when the website is busy) and it requires more resources
    • if you use CDNs it could be that your website is not triggered because of the third party caching solution
    • better not to use for tasks which are heavy (backups for instance) or which are time-sensitive (newsletter, …)

8 Errors (Exit Codes)

If you get Error notifications mentioning Exit Codes, it is not very explicit.

The following file might already help you understanding what your Exit Code means :

https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/blob/5.2-dev/administrator/components/com_scheduler/src/Task/Status.php

Given the fact that a Task which does end properly might block the execution of the next tasks, you definitely want to check what happens if you get an Error.

PS: one example of Exit Code in real life: the Notification was enabled… but no Email or a wrong Email was set for the corresponding User

9 Conclusion

Have fun and enjoy the power of Joomla! ❤️💙🧡💚

10 Get in touch

https://slides.woluweb.be

Any suggestion about this presentation?
Please feel free to contact me. I’ll be happy to keep improving it 🙂

Marc Dechèvre | woluweb
+32 474 37 13 12 | +32 2 772 58 69

https://www.woluweb.be/contact

https://www.slideshare.net/woluweb