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>>This is something that's made me nervous ever since I built my Drupal website. I've never really understood what cron.php is for, so I've never used it. It says it's for running jobs that need to be done everyday, but what kinds of jobs are those?>>
cron.php does housekeeping things like:
* build the search index.
* rotate old logs out
Cron also updates feeds if you're using a module that aggregates external content, though you would have figured that out by now if you were trying to aggregate anything. There are other modules that explicitly use cron to assemble, aggregate or distribute mail.
If you actually run cron.php, you'll see a bunch of reports in your drupal logs that will probably tell you about more things that the script does. It doesn't have to run daily unless it has to run daily. It has to run "regularly" -- that means something different for each site.
>> What is the basic maintenance that should be done on a website? I do database backups every week, but what else should I be doing?>>
On any website or on a drupal website?
On a drupal site, you should be running cron.php. I'd say weekly if you don't need it more often than that. You should backup any uploads directories. And you should read the drupal security alerts.
____________________________________
Amanda B Hickman
Technical Director, Gotham Gazette
http://www.gothamgazette.com
tel 212 227 0342 ext 23
fax 212 227 0345
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