Question

I managed to post a status to my wall with a custom app, but what I want to do, is schedule the status, to be posted on a given datetime.

The problem was, when I close my app, the script is aborted.
Right now it works, I’m using ignore_user_abort(true) and sleep().

I’m also using set_time_limit(1), once the given datetime has passed, so the script stops.

I feel like this is crappy coding and want to know if there’s a better way to do this?

Here’s the code I’m using right now:

<?php
 ignore_user_abort(true);
 $token=$_GET["access_token"];
 $attachment =  array(
    'access_token' => "$token",
    'message' => "deze post moet om 14.14 online komen",
    'name' => "testpost",
    'link' => "http://myurl.be/",
    'description' => "Write here your description",
    'picture'=> "http://myurl/assets/images/layout/logo.png");

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Belgrade');
$time= date('d/m/Y H:i');
if ("10/01/2012 14:14" < $time ){
set_time_limit(1);
$result = $facebook->api('/me/feed/','post',$attachment);
}else{
sleep(60);
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt ($curl, CURLOPT_URL, "https://www.myurl.com/tests/facebooklogin/post.php?access_token=".$token);
curl_exec ($curl);
curl_close ($curl);
}  
print $result;
?>

Answer 1

You could store all the information needed for your post (text, link, description and so on) in a database (like MySQL), setup a PHP script that get’s called periodically by cron and fetches all posts from the database that need to be posted by the time the script get’s executed.

But be aware that access tokens expire after a few hours/a day or when the user changes his password. Unless you don’t have a “offline_access” permission, then the token never expires.