Hello Lisa,

Thank you for reaching out to us.

We will check this and update the tutorials. But you need to contact your hosting provider to set up cron on your server. This is how cron works.

You should know that 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.

Have a nice day. 

Hello Lisa,

They must know how to set this up since this is happening on the server (not in Amelia). You can send them this link, and tell them that it is necessary to set up a cron job on your server. This is strange since we have a big number of customers that uses the same hosting provider as you, and they have set this up for all of them. Maybe you can ask for a level two agents or someone else, since they must know how to do this. Your server is with them and this must be set up on the server and this information that we gave you are more then enough to set up everything correctly. Also we have to mention again Cron is not Amelia's feature cron is a WordPress feature that needs to be set on the server. 

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.