Hello Kory,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

Firstly, I would like to sincerely apologize for the delayed response as we have been experiencing an unusually high number of tickets. I am sorry that it has taken longer than usual to respond to your concern and your patience is highly appreciated.

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.

Hope this helps. 

Hello Kory,

If this helps once you do that you can test the cron and see if it works this is the command: https://www.yourwebsite.com/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wpamelia_api&call=/notifications/scheduled/send

So, to test notification, you need to book an appointment, then simply copy the URL above (just change yourwebsite.com to your domain name) and paste it in another browser window.

If you have any further questions or issues, please feel free to open a new ticket, and we'll gladly help you there.

We wish you all the best.

Have a nice day. 

Hello Kory,

You are most welcome we try to help as best as we can. We are not sure what you want to achieve but you can not use shortcode to Amelia notifications. It will be shown just as plain text. You can only use the placeholders in notifications.

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

We wish you all the best.

Have a nice day. 

Hello Kory,

You are most welcome. We will forward your ticket so that we can check this. Once we get the feedback we will contact you on this ticket. 

We wish you all the best. 

Hello Kory,

We just got the feedback from our colleagues and they have told us that you need need to add this in mu-plugins/functions.php

function wpamelia_dynamic_placeholder_appointment_approved_1($data)
{
    return 'This is first custom placeholder';
}
add_filter('amelia_dynamic_placeholder_appointment_approved_1', 'wpamelia_dynamic_placeholder_appointment_approved_1');
function wpamelia_dynamic_placeholder_appointment_approved_2($data)
{
    return 'This is second custom placeholder';
}

And in notifications you can put this:

%amelia_dynamic_placeholder_appointment_approved_1%
%amelia_dynamic_placeholder_appointment_approved_2%i 

You can put as many as you want. So the placeholder must have this shape: "%amelia_dynamic_placeholder_CUSTOMSTRING%". You need to copy this to your plugin and please let us know if everything is ok and if it is, we will add it to the plugin.

Hope this helps. 

Hello Kory,

You are most welcome, and we are glad that we were able to help you. If you have any more questions please open another ticket and we will gladly help you there.

We wish you all the best.

Have a nice day.