"Is currently anyway of doing scheduled tasks with PHP (without using crontab)? " "What's wrong with using cron?"
I'm building an OSS site where the PostgreSQL data base maintenance, email sending, stats gathering, number crunching and graph plotting needs to be automated. My target audience will need things as simple as possible. I am under the impression that it would be a hassle and cost more to get a web host to install a cron script for Postgres. (Or have php as an executable binary instead of shared object.) What I do so far is look at a serial number from a data base table. If it is divisible by 20, I fill up a graph plotting que. If divisible by 50, another que is filled, etc. The footer has a script that checks a table with each que status and then does does a few things out of the highest priority que. I figure the user will not notice a few small scripts running after all the text is displayed. If there is a better way, let me know!! Thanks, Jeff