08 April 2011, 0:30

at home i'm using Wamp to do all my PHP programming and my WordPress blog which i use as a timesheet tracker, ofcause i've always had a problem with in it places as it's not really good for a protfolio but then i heard about Mahara at uni.

problem is there's one part of the installation i don't get, the part that says; 

"You can set it up using the command line 'php' command to run the cron script, or by using a command line web browser such as lynx or w3m.

Something like the following in a crontab file will be sufficient:

* * * * * curl http://your-mahara-site.org/lib/cron.php"

now at first i ignored it but the intsallation won't start so i'm wondering what the above part is talking about

08 April 2011, 10:52

Hi Troy,

Cron is a time-based scheduler system (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron for more information).

With regards to Mahara specifically, it is a way to ensure that various administrative and background tasks take place. Many of these tasks have the potential to take quite a long time, and doing them on a standard page load displayed to a user would realyl suck for that user.

In Mahara, most of the cron jobs are related to sending forum mails, refreshing caches, and that kind of thing. Without the cron, your users won't be receiving such e-mails, and may not be able to view some files in views for exampe. Other things will also be missing, but they're the ones off the top of my head.

You can also run cronjobs on Windows, but they're known as scheduled tasks - the Drupal installation guide has some information on this: http://drupal.org/node/31506

Perhaps you could update the Mahara wiki once you've found your way to a reasonable solution.

Hope that this helps,

Andrew