Drupal Development Blog

"It's Only Just Begun"

The heading for this entry derives from an old song by The Carpenters which I am chagrined to say is now running through my head. Stop that!@ Ok now. On to my first Drupal problem.

I want to start going through the administration screens and seeing what's what, where to begin configuring things and possibly looking for my first target at customization. After clicking 'Administer' though I got the following message near the top of the page and encased in a CSS rendered pale pink box:

"One or more problems were detected with your Drupal installation. Check the status report for more information."

So clicking the status report link within that pink box message I now see the following:

Cron maintenance tasks Never run
Cron has not run. It appears cron jobs have not been setup on your system. Please check the help pages for configuring cron jobs. You can run cron manually.

Fearlessly I press on (punny, huh?) clicking on the link that Drupal conveniently placed in the error message to run cron manually. I get another status report, this time saying:

"Cron maintenance tasks Last run 1 sec ago"

Whew, almost got me nervous for a minute there, thinking I'd have to open a Putty window and get on the shell over to my server, then figure out how to edit the crontab from there.

BTW if you don't already know about cron, it is a Unix daemon which runs programs in an automatically scheduled fashion. Cron is cool - check out the Wikipedia article for more info.