Maintenance
From time to time we may wish to perform some maintenance on our site; let's look at three common ways of maintaining our installation:
Automated maintenance: Cron
Making changes and updating our site
Analysing Drupal reports and performing maintenance accordingly
Cron
Cron is the automated execution of tasks by our server. Many Drupal modules perform regular maintenance tasks (for example, pruning log files), by using cron these tasks can be automatically performed at specific intervals.
Setting up cron jobs is quite technical, and depends on your hosting provider too, as not all hosting providers allow cron jobs to run. You should contact your web host for more information on setting up a cron job.
The Drupal handbook online contains more information about setting up cron. http://drupal.org/cron.
Looking up the secure cron URL
If you are comfortable with setting up a cron job, you will need to generate a secure cron URL from Drupal. This is a web address which when called by our cron...