• Thank you for providing the plugin.

    The Readme.txt was not helpful.
    The Readme2.txt was not helpful.

    The installation instructions make sense, only in retrospect.

    This widget is working nicely for me, but the instructions are not usable.

    ———

    I am writing this only in case it might help someone else.

    To get it to work, here’s what I did.
    …install the plugin as normal.

    After install, you need to provide a page that displays the subscription form to the user. This is a simple form that asks for the user’s email, and they need to click “OK”. The install instructions had lots of words about this, which, despite their numbers, brought little clarity as to what this thing was.

    The page can be implemented in any .php module, but is most often a “WordPress Page” – that is to say a page configured from the admin backend in wordpress. The Post Notification admin panel has a checkbox pertaining to this, labelled appropriately. If you check it and click “Save”, then the PN plugin will create a page for you. This is probably what you want.

    If you then view the page that the PN plugin created, you will see that it contains very little. It contains only template tokens, like @@post_notification_header and so on. These get replaced at runtime with the values you have configured in the PN Settings panel in the backend.

    The PN plugin is driven by templates, in various languages. You select the language (==template directory) via a dropdown in the PN admin UI, then you get all those templates. The templates are used to provide the front-end user interaction. Things like the “Thank you for subscribing”, and “Are you sure you want to unsubscribe?” boilerplate are provided in template files, in various languages.

    I could not find a way to view or edit the templates in the PN admin UI. Instead I used a text editor to examine and edit the template files, which reside in all the various language directories.

    The plugin advises that if you edit templates, be sure to save them, because an upgrade to the plugin will destroy your edits. Be advised.

    In addition to editing the templates by hand, I also hacked frontend.php in the plugin, because it displayed odd things when you disable category subscriptions. I wanted a simple email notification. The plugin allows users to subscribe to some or all categories on the blog, but also has an administrative setting that eliminates that option and makes it an all-or-none subscription. When doing that the “please subscribe me” form displayed by the plugin is nonsensical. There is an ineffectual radio selection, and the words on the button is “Save”, when … it ought to be “Confirm”. So I needed to hack frontend.php to make it do something reasonable.

    —-

    With all that said, I recommend the plugin. It’s working for me.

    https://www.ads-software.com/extend/plugins/post-notification/

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Yes, I was confused and had quite a hard time figuring it out… I don’t think the author’s English skills are good enough, although (s)he makes no grammar mistakes… it’s almost as if the incoherence is on purpose, that’s how confusing the texts are :(.

    So, I agree with editing the front-end php files too. Overall, very good advice and clarification! The plugin is not likely to be updated soon anyway…

    I’m translating the template files into Romanian if anyone is interested.

    Hi,

    I would like replace the search form with post notification subscription form.

    Is there a way to display the post notification form on “archive, search, 404 etc pages” with template tag?

    Display current category and then “subscribe to category updates” with form.

    Any help?

    Cheers

    Hi

    Yes, you can do that, but you need to know either PHP or HTML/CSS and perhaps Javascript too in order to accomplish your goal, and it takes some coding (no longer than half an hour I suppose).

    So, what you need to do is grab hold of two plugins: “Shortcode Exec PHP” in which you will be able to define the shortcodes yourself (no PHP knowledge required, you can just create HTML snippets in it) – but you don’t need shortcodes at all to do what you want, so that’s optional. Make sure you check the option to enable shortcodes in that plugin’s associated widgets (which allow using code to get, display and format content too – that’s why shortcodes aren’t necessary).

    You may also need a secondary plugin “Widget Logic” (there are others that do the same) which you can use to specify on which pages to show different widgets (if you only know HTML, you will need to create a widget for each page).

    Then copy the code from the template files in the en-US directory within “Post Notification” plugin’s folder and copy the registration snippet to your code widgets, modifying them as you like (you need to set the “checked” attribute on the corresponding ‘<input type=”radio”‘ element from the HTML subscription form in the case of per-category registration for example, and hide them all using the CSS rule “display: none”).

    However, if you know PHP, there’s no need for any of the above plugins, as you can simply use a conditional statement and WordPress’ built-in API functions to check for the current page type, current category and dynamically display content.

    Good luck!

    Not really a PHP expert but I’ll try to figure it out or to find some programmer that can do that for me…

    Thanks for advice…

    I repeat, no need for a PHP expert at all. Just basic HTML (and you can grab the knowledge you need on the way). I’d help you, but I’m busy getting my own site right, and I haven’t even tried fiddling with this plugin too much myself – I’m auto-registering users who comment by logging in through their third-party social networks accounts as a means of verifying e-mail, so I’d have liked to remove all those unnecessary stepts – confirmation pages and e-mail messages required for this plugin to subscribe someone, but that’s too much work – I’m lazy, I admit, so I just let it work the way it was meant to.

    I’ve finished translating the subscribe e-mail and pages templates to Romanian however, if anyone’s interested.

    I’m pretty much busy too, but I’ll do my best, thanks mate!

    Hi guys,

    Would you please tell me how to set Post Notification to send out a daily or weekly notification for all new posts of the week?
    I don’t want it to send ou a mail for every post.

    Thanks

    I urgently need to know how to modify this to incorporate custom post types. This can be done with Subcribe2, but that plugin is no good for registered user themes.

    For Subscribe2, this code is added in functions.php… apparently.

    function my_post_types($types) {
    	$types[] = 'job_listing';
    	return $types;
    }
    
    add_filter('s2_post_types', 'my_post_types');

    Please… does anyone know how to set Post Notification to send out a daily or weekly notification with a configured number of posts, and not an individual notification for every post?

    Thanks,

    Kenny

    +1 for grouping posts into one mail.

    I will also need this for custom post type in future… hope somebody finds the solution…

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • The topic ‘[Plugin: Post Notification] PN works well, once you figure it out’ is closed to new replies.