Making Magento catalog price rules stick.
I am involved in an ecommerce venture that uses magento commerce to manage sales. For months I have been bugged by the fact that catalog price rules do not stick – you run the rule from the admin system; all looks great on the site; discounts are applied, but a day later the rule has stopped working and has to be applied again. Very frustrating and not cool.
The good news is I have eventually found a fix to the problem. Basically you need to update near the bottom of the cron.php file to read as follows:
Mage::getConfig()->init()->loadEventObservers(’crontab’);
Mage::app()->addEventArea(’crontab’);
Mage::dispatchEvent(’default’);
$ob = Mage::getModel(’catalogrule/observer’);
$ob->dailyCatalogUpdate(”0 1 * * *”);
Once this is in place you can browse the cron.php file directly and take a deep sigh of relief.
I am still skeptical whether or not the cron job that I set up is actually going to kick this off automatically. Time will tell. I see though that if it does not work, there are services out there that will run a page on your site at specified intervals.
Holding thumbs.

Developer by day, husband and dad by night and dreaming about sport inbetween.