WordPress Cron
But what to do if you need to execute your task more often, than default schedule intervals offered by WordPress? Can you manage WordPress scheduler to start your job every 5 minutes instead of ‘hourly’, ‘twicedaily’ and ‘daily’ intervals?
Yes. I found the answer inside wp_schedule_event() function source code. It is well commented:
"Valid values for the recurrence are hourly, daily and twicedaily. These can be extended using the cron_schedules filter in wp_get_schedules()".
So we can configure any custom time interval for WP Cron task schedule. Look how it could be done:
add_filter('cron_schedules', 'add_scheduled_interval'); // add once 5 minute interval to wp schedules public function add_scheduled_interval($schedules) { $schedules['minutes_5'] = array('interval'=>300, 'display'=>'Once 5 minutes'); return $schedules; } |
We just added new ‘minutes_5’ interval (300 seconds = 60 * 5 = 5 minutes) to the list of WP Cron schedule intervals and can use it to schedule new WP Cron job.
Let’s do the final step – setup our cron job to be executed every 5 minutes:
if (!wp_next_scheduled('your_cron_hook_name_here')) { wp_schedule_event(time(), 'minutes_5', 'your_cron_hook_name_here'); } add_action('your_cron_hook_name_here', 'your_task_executor'); function your_task_executor() { // some code to execute by schedule here } |
For additional reading I offer you to pay attention of these very useful tutorials related to WP Cron:
- Do it yourself. WordPress Scheduling: Mastering WP Cron.
- Insights into WP Cron. An introduction to scheduling tasks in WordPress
- WP Cron API at WordPress Codex
Tags: WordPress
