NOTE: This version of CaRP is obsolete. This documentation is being left here for those who have not yet upgraded to the current version.

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Examples:
Styles & Classes | Multiple Feeds on a Page | Unordered List | Background Refreshing | Filtering | Aggregating 1 | Aggregating 2 | JavaScript

When displaying newsfeeds from slow servers or displaying many newsfeeds on the same page, your own page will load slowly whenever the cache is refreshed. One way to speed up the loading of multiple newsfeeds on a page is to set $carpconf['cacheinterval'] to a different number for each one. If visitors come to your page often enough, usually only one cache will be refreshed at a time, providing acceptable performance. However, if your page is only rarely accessed, using different cache intervals may not solve the problem.

Another solution is to set up background refreshing of your cache files. This is done by setting up a "cron job" to periodically load a web page containing the newsfeeds. When setting up such a system, note the following points:

1. The page loaded by the cron job should not be the same page that is loaded by your website visitors. The reason for this is that the cache interval for the page loaded by the cron job needs to be shorter than the interval for the page loaded by your visitors to ensure that the cron job always handles the refresh.
2. Another reason for having a different page is that the page loaded by the cron job doesn't need to contain anything but the newsfeed, but the page being shown to visitors will usually contain various other content. See "update_news.php" below for an example.
3. It may be best to have a separate web page (a separate file like "update_news.php") and cron job (a separate "update_news.pl", or a way to pass the address of "update_news.php" in to "update_news.pl") for each newsfeed to avoid problems with timing out on slow or temporarily unavailable newsfeeds.
4. Note that since the page loaded by the cron job is determining all of the formatting of the newsfeed, you don't need to set up all of the formatting in the page seen by your website visitors.

update_news.php
This file is loaded by "update_news.pl", show below, to set the formatting of the newsfeed and refresh the cache file:

update_news.pl
Depending on your PHP setup, cron jobs may not be able to load and execute PHP files directly. Even if they can, it is usually preferable to have the cron job execute a script which loads the PHP file to ensure that there are no problems with file access and that you don't get an unnecessary email every time the cron job runs.

This is a script written in Perl which is executed by cron to connect to the web server and load update_news.php. Refer to the documentation for cron for instructions on how to set up the cron job on your server:

Note that you'll need to change "www.yourwebsite.com" (near the top) and "/path/to/update_news.php" (near the bottom) to the appropriate values for your setup. The cron job can run on a different computer from the webserver. When doing that, enter the hostname of the computer where the cron job is running in the "$hostname=" line.