Scheduled Update Summary

You can reach this page from Site Overview, Automations, Scheduled Update Summary.

This page lets you create and manage scheduled tasks which compile and email a summary of available updates for the site.

These tasks make sense on sites where the core and/or third party software update preferences have been set to None, i.e. they are neither automatically installed, nor do they result in emails sent out automatically.

To create a new task click on the Add button in the toolbar.

To edit an existing task, click on the task's Schedule (it's a link). Alternatively, select the box next to the task and then click the Edit button in the toolbar; if you have selected multiple tasks only the first one will be edited.

To delete one or more tasks, select their boxes next to each task's line and click on the Delete button in the toolbar.

Creating or editing a task

The top part of the page determines what will be included in the email:

• Include core CMS updates in the email. Enable to include Joomla! and WordPress update availability in the email sent.
• Include third party software updates in the email. Enable to include Joomla! extension and WordPress plugin and theme update availability in the email sent.
• Prevent identical emails. When enabled, Panopticon will not send an email if the list of pending updates is identical to the list of updates it processed the last time it sent out an email.
• Enabled. Should this task execute periodically? You can disable a task if you want to prevent it from executing, but you do not want to permanently delete it.

Below that, you can select you will receive an email.

If the Email These Groups option is left blank, emails will be sent to all users who have adequate permissions to make changes to the site in Akeeba Panopticon. When you select one or more groups the emails will be sent to all users who are assigned to the selected group, even if they can't even view the site in the Sites Overview page.

To add a group to the list, click on the blank space inside the Email These Groups field to show a drop-down list of groups. Select a group, or start typing a few characters to filter out the drop-down list. Then, click on the group to select it. Remove a group from the list by using the X icon to the right hand side of the group's name.

Schedule definition

The Schedule section determines when the task will execute. The schedule is a CRON expression. The timezone for it is displayed on the page, and depends on the System Configuration options of the Panopticon installation.

The third party CRON expression engine in Akeeba Panopticon supports the special characters *, ,, -, L, W, #, and /, allowing you great flexibility as to when you want the CRON job to execute.

You can test your CRON expressions using this third party page.

⚠️ Do NOT use an LLM (such as ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, …) to generate CRON expressions. According to our testing, their results are laughably inaccurate, and very often outright invalid. Kindly note that complaining an LLM's hallucinations is causing problems to you is the fastest way to get your issue / discussion / email closed or deleted.

The Repetition field determines what happens when the task is executed:

• Repeat according to schedule will periodically execute the task according to the schedule. This is what most people expect from a scheduling feature.
• Run once, then disable this schedule will run the task one time according to the set schedule, then it will disable the task. The task is still there, but since it's disabled it does not execute again. This may be good for tasks you only want to execute semi-manually.
• Run once, then DELETE this schedule will run the task one time according to the set schedule, then it will permanently delete disable the task. The task will no longer appear anywhere. This may be a good candidate for one-off tasks you don't expect to have a use for in the foreseeable future.