CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi All -
I've got a test environment of civiCRM on Wordpress set up and running fine except that the Scheduled Reminders feature doesn't seem to work for me.   Perhaps I'm not understanding how these reminders work...

I've configured the Administer > System Settings > Outbound Mail (SMTP)  and my test message is sent and received (using gmail server)

I've confirmed that I can send/receive a confirmation message for an Event (e.g. conference) registrant.

But when I set up a New Activity (e.g. Phone Call, meeting, etc.) under Contacts >New Activity and then set up a Scheduled Reminder for Phone Call activities under Administer > Communications > Schedule Reminders  the reminder is never e-mailed out.    I think I've followed all the instructions here http://book.civicrm.org/user/current/email/scheduled-reminders/

I've enabled the component "Scheduled reminders sender", under Administer > System Settings > Scheduled Jobs and it is set to go every time cron is run.

I've put in a Cron job per instructions here:  http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Managing+Scheduled+Jobs   using the PHP cli method....  I don't know how to tell if the Cron job is working???

Any ideas?  Thanks for you help.

Thanks much for the suggestions!   I really appreciate the tip on setting the reminder for After the event time!

Well, something is working now, I successfully got an email reminder for a Phone Call activity I created with the Reminder set to 0 hours AFTER scheduled.  I did run the scheduled job using the execute now via the UI.  I'm not all that knowledgeable about cron...how long does the Execute now last (if that makes sense)? And is there a way to determine if my cron I set up on the server is working so I don't have to run this manually from the UI in the future?

On another note (maybe I need to post this in it's own thread) .... but I'm getting an error message that my PHP and mySQL timestamps are mismatched.  Do you happen to know how to fix that?  My web hosting company tech support told me to modify the php.ini file, and I looked at that but I didn't see how to modify it.  Here's the error message:

Timestamps reported by MySQL (eg "2014-06-03 07:08") and PHP (eg "2014-06-03 13:08" ) are mismatched.

Any ideas are very appreciated.

Thanks!