Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Setting up cron jobs


In Drupal, cron jobs are used to schedule and perform various maintenance tasks on your site. Within a Drupal site, cron jobs trigger several important tasks, such as building the search index for your site, and generating and updating log files. Frequently, other modules will also set up actions that are triggered by cron jobs.

The name cron job comes from the Linux utility cron. It is an automated scheduling program installed on Linux systems. For an overview of cron, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron.

Drupal 7 now ships with a module for automating cron jobs. To configure the module, click on Configuration | Cron, or navigate to admin/config/system/cron.

The configuration options allow you to specify how frequently cron should run. For most learning sites, cron should run every two to three hours. Since Drupal's default setting is 3 hours, no further configuration is necessary!

If you need to run cron jobs more frequently than the module allows, you can also configure...