Question: How do I set up the Daily Digest?

Answer: Geeklog can send out an email containing pointers to the stories posted during the last 24 hours to all those users who subscribed to this service. This is called the Daily Digest.

What you need is cron and the ability to call PHP scripts from a cronjob (if you don't have cron / cronjobs, you can still use this feature by installing the Manual Digest plugin).

In the directory where your config.php lies, you'll find a file called emailgeeklogstories. In this file, you need to set the path to your lib-common.php file. Next, you need to set

$_CONF['emailstories'] = 1;

in your config.php. Now every user will have a new section in their Preferences where they can select topics which they will get emailed.

You need to set up a cronjob to call emailgeeklogstories once a day. All the users which selected topics to be emailed to them, will then get a digest email with all the new stories of the day.

If you're not familiar with the crontab syntax: You will need to add a line that looks like this:

30 2 * * * /path/to/geeklog/emailgeeklogstories

This would call the emailgeeklogstories script every day at 2:30am. Make sure that the script is executable, i.e. do a chmod 775 (or similar) on it.

As of Geeklog 1.3.6, you can also use the variable $_CONF['emailstorieslength'] to set what the users will see in this email: It's either only the title, the complete intro text of the article, or a certain amount of characters from the introtext. A link to the story is always included.

A word of warning: The first time you activate this, all stories in your Geeklog database are considered new - so the first email may be quite large (this only happens the very first time you activate this feature on your site, not for every new user subscribing to the Daily Digest - they will only get the new stories since the last time the digest was sent).

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FAQ » Usage » How do I set up the Daily Digest?