Hello Tara,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

Cron is not Amelia's feature cron is a WordPress feature. You can use cron with Amelia, but setting cron is not part of Amelia's support because it is not our feature. If your cron is not working and you cannot set it up, you need to contact your hosting provider so that they can set up cron for you.

We will try to help you as best we can in the meantime cron is a Linux utility that schedules a command or script on your server to run automatically at a specified time and date. A cron job is the scheduled task itself. Cron jobs can be very useful to automate repetitive tasks like in our plugin for notifications.

Depending on the server, there are different configurations for it, which you can contact your hosting provider about, or you can check out one of the solutions for it on this link.

Also, you can try this:

*/15 * * * * wget -q -O - "https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wpamelia_api&call=/notifications/scheduled/send"

Or this:

*/15 * * * * /usr/local/bin/php ~/public_html/wp-cron.php --action='wpamelia_api' --call='/notifications/scheduled/send'

Or this:

GET 'https://yourdomain.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wpamelia_api&call=/notifications/scheduled/send' > /dev/null

WP Crontrol plugin is the best option if you're not familiar with cron jobs. You can find more info about it, and detailed instructions on how to set it up in our FAQ section.

So, if you already read that, and still need some clarification here's some further info.

You copy only the URL from below a scheduled notification:

Then, go to Tools/Cron Events, and click on the "Cron Schedules" tab. In it, add a 15-minute interval:

Then go back to the "Cron Events" tab and click on "Add new":

Below it, select the "PHP Cron event" radio button, and add the URL you copied from Amelia/Notifications in this form:

file_get_contents("yourURL");

Below it add the name and set it to run a few minutes in the future, using the provided time format. So, if you're adding the cron event at 12:45 (local, current time), set it to run at 12:50; and then select the schedule you previously selected:

Click on Add Event, and that's it.

The cron runs every 15 minutes and checks if there's an email to be sent. So, in Amelia Notifications, your scheduled notifications are set to run every day at a certain time. If you set that time to be 15:00 (for example), the emails will be sent when the cron runs after that time.

For example, there's an appointment booked for tomorrow, and it's currently 14:44 - the cron runs, but since it's not yet 15:00, it doesn't send anything. It runs again after 15 minutes, so at 14:59, but there are still no emails flagged by Amelia, so it doesn't send anything. Then it runs again at 15:14 and it sees there's an email that should've been sent at 15:00, so it sends the email. It will only send emails when Amelia sees an appointment scheduled for the next day.

I hope that helps in case it doesn't please contact your hosting provider.

If you have any more questions please open another ticket and we will gladly help you there.

We wish you all the best.

Hi , Tara.

If i undestood, at one point you tried to use WP Crontrol but when adding a new cron Event, it does not show the PHP option for you?

If that is the case, 

We recently had some false reports that the PHP Cron Events have been removed from WP Crontrol.

On WP Crontrol's official page , we then confirmed that is not the case. 

They are covered in the FAQ on the same page with instructions on how they are used. 

Also, in the "Which users can manage PHP cron events?” section of the same FAQ, they mention a possible reason why users can't see the "PHP Event" radio button (the user you're logged in to WordPress with most likely doesn't have the edit_files capability).

We just installed WP Crontrol on our live testing site (the latest version which was updated recently) and the PHP Cron radio button is there. The command works without issues, and we've received the reminder normally.

Crons are scheduled tasks of the server, so it is not an issue coming from Amelia.

Please make sure you have the latest WP Crontrol version installed;

go through the steps explained in their FAQ section, that is mentioned above, if that does not help, please contact their support for troubleshooting.

Let us know how it goes. 

We will be here to help as much as possible from our end, and to advise you.

Thank you