Let your site do things automatically, even when you are away. You set up a recurring task — for example every morning — and it runs by itself at the scheduled moment.
Work off your plate
Think of a daily news update that writes and publishes itself, a weekly summary, or automatically cleaning up old data. Your site stays current without you having to check in all the time.
Always traceable
Every automatic run is kept in a log, so you can check exactly what happened.
Help with the setup
Setting up an automatic task properly is somewhat technical work. Ster Software is happy to configure it for you, tailored precisely to what you want to happen automatically — get in touch.
Why automation is worth setting up once
A task you configure once keeps running for as long as your site exists, without anyone having to remember to do it. That reliability is the real value — not the time saved on any single run, but the fact that it never gets forgotten.
A common use case: a weekly digest sent to your subscribers through automated email, built from whatever content was published that week — no manual copy-pasting required.
Scheduled tasks also work well for maintenance, such as archiving old entries in a data type once they are no longer relevant, keeping your lists tidy without manual cleanup.
Practical tip: start with a low-risk task, like a weekly summary, before automating anything that publishes content directly — it gives you a feel for the logs and timing first.
What makes a good candidate for automation
The best tasks to automate are the ones that are boring, repetitive, and easy to forget — not the ones that need judgment every time. A weekly digest built from whatever was published that week is a good candidate, because the logic ("take the last seven days of content") doesn't change. Something that requires a human decision each time, like choosing which single story to feature, is a poor candidate and usually ends up needing manual override anyway.
It also helps to automate something you were already doing manually and reliably, rather than inventing a new process purely because automation makes it possible. A task nobody was doing consistently by hand rarely becomes more valuable just because it now runs on a schedule.
Scheduled tasks across different kinds of sites
A content site benefits from a task that publishes a queued article at a set time each day, keeping a predictable publishing rhythm without anyone needing to be online at that exact moment — dates shown consistently across the site, via the format date block, make that rhythm visible to visitors too.
An e-commerce site benefits from a task that archives out-of-stock products, generated via dynamic pages, after a set period, keeping listings current without manual cleanup. A community site benefits from a task that compiles recent activity into a digest for subscribers, sent automatically every week.
Common mistakes with automated tasks
The most common mistake is automating something before the manual process is well understood. If you're not sure exactly what "clean up old data" should mean in every edge case, automating it prematurely risks silently doing the wrong thing at 3am with nobody watching. Run it manually a few times first, refine the logic, then automate.
The second is not checking the run log after setup. A task that fails silently every week is worse than no automation at all, since it creates a false sense that something is happening when it isn't. Check the log periodically, especially in the first weeks after setting a new task up.
For background on how a task's output — a published record, a sent email — connects to the rest of the site, see data types and records in the knowledge base.
How to ask the assistant
Create a daily task that writes and publishes a news update at 9:00.