Setting up cron

This page is for beginners; more complete information can be found on the main cron page. If you can understand that page, then use it first.

Cron is a UNIX command that allows you to run tasks on a schedule. There are things in Drupal that will run on a timed basis, if cron is available.

Access to the shell means you can get to the operating system to issue commands. Many hosts won't allow this. But they do provide the more-or-less-standard cPanel function. On some versions, the "cron" entry is in the lower left.

For Cron jobs another possibility is http://drupal.org/project/poormanscron

For every page view, this module checks to see if the last Cron run was more than one hour ago (this period is configurable). If so, the Cron hooks are executed, and Drupal is happy. These Cron hooks fire after all HTML is returned to the browser, so the user who kicks off the Cron jobs should not notice any delay.