Hello Mohamed,

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.

Have a nice day. 

Hello Mohamed,

Thank you for purchasing our product, and for reaching out to us.

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 this doesn't help you can send us temporary admin credentials so that we can test this.

We wish you all the best.

Have a nice day. 

Hello Mohamed,

we just wish to add one more detail about setting the cron with WPCrontrol Plugin.

This is rare, but we had a couple of users who reported that WPCrontrol was showing a syntax error when they look in their Cron Events for the Amelia PHP Event they made.

Please check under the "Cron Events", can you notice any syntax error coming up?

For example, like on this image :

Or does it look like this, with no syntax error?

If you see a syntax error, please edit the Cron Event PHP code, and change the double quotes (") to single quotes around the URL line in the brackets (') , for example like this

file_get_contents('http://localhost/current/wp-admin/admin-ajax.php?action=wpamelia_api&call=/notifications/scheduled/send');

Of course, just change the URL inside the brackets to yours from your Scheduled Notification in Amelia.

Then do the test for the Cron by manually running it, as colleague Marko advised,

and see if it works after that.

If this doesn't help you can send us temporary admin credentials so that we can test this.

If you send us URL with Admin credentials, just make sure to send a PRIVATE reply for security reasons,

then only we can see the message.

Thank you.

Hi Raphaël,

Are you using the WP Crontrol Plugin to create your Cron Events?

If that is the case, that is not an issue with Amelia, but an issue with WP Crontrol Plugin.

Since WP Crontrol is not our Plugin, our Support does not cover it - 

so if your Cron Event disappears afer some time and you need to recreate it, please reach out to the WP Crontrol Support, they should be able to help you isolate why this issue happens in their Plugin.

Thank you.

Hi Tolga,

Thank you for sharing the command which works well on your hosting server's configuration.

That can be useful if another user comes across this ticket, if they have the same configuration.

But, there can be different ways to configure a Cron job on WordPress, each hosting server could have a different setup, so there is no universal way.

For any other users who might come across this ticket and are new to this, we will just repeat the basics.

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 possible 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.

We hope that might help other users who could experience similar issues.

Thank you.

Hi Tolga,

No problem at all.

Please don't hesitate to open new tickets for any new/unrelated issues and our Support will always be there to respond.

Thank you.