Handling Reoccurring Events in PHP/MySQL

Question

Example

7.30pm, second Monday each month
or
7.30pm, first & third Thursday each month.

Basically I want a upcoming events list for the next month.

How do I handle reoccurring events in PHP/MySQL?

Answer 1

Assuming a linux like environment: Have a cron job execute your php script.

Answer 2

I think cron has a pretty flexible way of recording schedules for repeating tasks, it might be worth diving into how it works (it is open source).

I also found this class for parsing crontab entries - http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2568.html - I can't vouch for how good the code is, it's quite old (but crontab doesn't change much). The example given uses a MySQL database to store the tasks, so it might be worth at least looking at for ideas.