Can Yii do this?

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

Hi Group

I’m not a programmer so forgive me if this a “duh” sorta question. I want to develop a web app which at a set date and time, can automatically send a mass email shot using either Amazon Simple Email Service or Postmark.

Can Yii do this?

Thanks

R

2

Of course you can do that with Yii (in fact - depending on your needs - Yii could be total overkill too ;-)).

There are two ways:

  1. You can create a simple console app, so no user interface, where yo have to type in your date and the app does everything quietly in the backround

  2. You could create a fancy pants webapp with UI and lots of buttons too.

The only part I can’t speak for is the Amazon Simple Email Service as I don’t know the API but I am 99% sure that it is a trivial task to talk to this service via Yii (i bet they use a REST service or something like that).

3

Addition: There seems to be an official PHP library to talk to SES

4

Yii won’t provide you a solution for your problem. Most probably you need to setup a Cronjob to execute the desired action at a specific time.

You still can build that application (console- or webbased) with Yii - But it does not natively provide functions for setup cronjobs or execute actions at a specific time because this is something that needs to be done at system level (PHP is not designed for that).

5

Ok thats awesome! Thanks you guys :) Now to find a Yii developer! :)

6

You should be able to create cronjobs via UI from within the app with a bit of hacking (see http://www.yiiframework.com/extension/webshell). You could call a shell script that receives the date and creates a cron which would trigger a Yii action sending data to Amazon’s Service. With ipFilters it should be quite secure too. As I said, total overkill if you don’t need some sort of web presentation (UI or something) ;)

Here’s an interesting link: http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/managing-cron-jobs-with-php-2/