Manually sending notifications

Hi Theo,

If you see a “Pause” action link, for a post on the Manage Post Notifs Sent page, it means that the notification process is running (so emails are being sent) – the “Number of Notifs Sent” column should reflect how far the process has made it through your set of subscribers. If a notification process appears to be stuck (that is, upon refreshing the page, you see no increase in the number of notifs sent), you can hit “Pause” and then (when the page reloads, showing the process status as “Paused”) you can hit “Resume”, which should re-start the process from where it had stopped.

And, just to circle back to your first sentence, if you enable “Auto” for the Post Notif setting, in the Publish meta box (whether by selecting it each time yourself or setting it as the default in the plugin settings via Settings >> Post Notif), it should still work as it did before, triggering the post notification automatically upon publish; the only difference is that the progress bar is gone, so you need to go to the Manage Post Notifs Sent page (as it sounds like you did) to monitor the progress of the send. If at any time (after a post is published, of course) you want to manually send a notification, you can do so by pressing the “Send” button (or “RESEND”, if a notification has already been sent for this post) in the Post Notif meta box, on the Edit Post page.

I hope this helps you complete your notification send processes, as intended. I apologize for the confusion that was inevitable with the changes introduced in version 1.2.0, but I am hopeful they will make the plugin work better, overall, for everyone, by providing more insight into the true status of each send process, as well as more flexibility for scheduling, pausing, and restarting.

Thanks,
Devon

Thanks for your reply Devon, but that doesn’t work. I hit the Pause button and nothing happens. The notification is still ” In progress” since yesterday.

At the Edit Post page there is no button Send or Resend. There’s only the message that the process is in progress.

In older posts, where the notification allready has been sent automatically, there is a button send.

So after three days the notification is still “in progress” and not sent.

There’s something not working in the plug-in Devon ??

Regards,

Theo

Hi Theo,

I am really sorry to hear that things have not improved for you!

It is unclear to me why the “Pause” action links are not working for you as I did not encounter any of this in my own testing (and have not been able to recreate this situation either in my local or production environments) nor have I heard any other reports of this occurring.

If you have access directly to your database, you can run the following SQL statement to pause all “in process” notifications (please substitute in your own table prefix if you are not using the default “wp_” prefix):

UPDATE wp_post_notif_post SET send_status = 'P' WHERE send_status = 'I';

You can then attempt to cancel these, via the Manage Post Notifs Sent page (as they should now display a clickable “Cancel” action). If for some reason, that does not work, you can run this SQL statement to cancel them:

UPDATE wp_post_notif_post SET send_status = 'X' WHERE send_status = 'P';

If none of this works, or you do not have direct access to your database, I am afraid you’ll need to de-activate and physically delete Post Notif v1.2.0 (and all of its data – be POSITIVE you want to do this before you do and, ideally, back up your entire system [both file server and database], or at a minimum, export your subscribers) and re-install v1.1.5. Or find another post notification plugin that works better with your setup.

Hope this helps,
Devon

• This reply was modified 6 years, 11 months ago by Devon Ostendorf.

I have deleted Post Notif and installed it again. Imported all my subscribers. That went fine.

Now waiting for another post at my blog. I hope to write it next week, so then I can try if it works.

Regards,

Theo

Hi Theo,

Thanks for the update; I will cross my fingers that things work better for your next post!

Thanks,
Devon

Yesterday evening I posted a new blog. I checked the settings before posting. On the page with the blog the setting of Post Notif was “Automatic”. In the settingslist in the menubar also the checkbox “Automatic” was switched on.

So I’ve sent the post and finger crossed. But nothing happened. Strange enough the setting on the page with the blog had been changed to “Manual”, and I didn’t do it!

The notification in the list is again on “Pending” and since then nothing has happened.

Your plug-in has functioned well till about a month ago. Something must have changed!

Regards,

Theo

Hi Theo,

I’m sorry things are still not working for you. I can explain the setting changing from “Auto” to “Manual”, however. That is, as designed, to prevent inadvertent re-sending of post notifications for a post that is updated after initial publish.

As I mentioned before, a LOT of code did change, as a part of the version 1.2.0 update, so it is unlikely we’d be able to isolate exactly which change made this stop working in your server environment. One thing I did just think of, though, is whether you have WP Cron disabled? As of 1.2.0 it is required, even for “Send Now”/”Auto” send on publish.

Thanks,
Devon

OK, your explanation is fine.

But disabling WP Cron? Can I do that without any consequences to my website?

And how do I do that? I found something on the internet to insert
define(‘DISABLE_WP_CRON’. true);
in the WP-Cron.php file. But is that right? And where do I insert it. The file has 139 lines.

I will try that next time I post a blog on my website.

Thanks,

Theo

Hi. I have the same problem. Any final solutions?

Hi Theo (and smix),

Re-reading my last post I see that what I said was confusing.

What I intended to say was that WP Cron IS required for Post Notif to work. I wanted to confirm that you had NOT disabled WP Cron either directly or via another plugin because that (the inability of WP Cron to run) could be the culprit preventing your send process from working.

Thanks,
Devon

OK, thanks. I haven’t changed anything so WP Cron must be enabled.

But I just published a new post on my website and it still doesn’t work.

On the page managing Posts, there is again the message “In Process”.

It’s a pity, because it worked well all the time.

Hi Theo,

I’m very sorry to hear that Post Notif is still not working for you. I sincerely appreciate the effort you’ve put in to help me try to get things to work for you but I’m afraid I’m at a loss for how to advise you to proceed. Other than to re-state the obvious, which is [to say] that the way the code is presently written it doesn’t appear to work on your server.

I know a lot of people use MailPoet, Email Subscribers & Newsletters, Better Notifications for WordPress, and Subscribe2 (among others), for post notification, so I’d encourage you to check these out and see if they work for you.

As a last resort, if you cannot find another plugin to provide the functionality you need, you could consider exporting your subscribers from Post Notif, de-activating and deleting Post Notif, and then re-installing an older version of Post Notif (when it worked well for you), re-importing your subscribers, and ignoring the “updates available” messages.

Again, I’m sorry this has been such a pain for you!

Thanks,
Devon

Hi Devon,
Yesterday I installed Post Notif on my Synology WP and I have the same problem as Theo. Sending subscription and unsubscription mails work well but when I create a new post the notification request is visible at the Manage Post Notifs Sent page but no mail is sent. I also see only a pause button below the ID.
I tried version 1.3.0. as well as 1.2.0 with the same result.
I also tried different themes but no success.

Do you still have no idea how to solve this?

Hi mayrk,

Thanks for giving Post Notif a try! I’m sorry, however, to hear that you are running into similar issues as Theo.

I can’t say I have any familiarity with Synology so I am afraid I don’t know how PHP is configured on their boxes.

A root cause for the problem(s) described on this thread has still not been identified though I’d certainly pursue eradicating it if/when it is isolated.

If you are willing to try one more thing, I’d be curious to see what happens if you install version 1.1.5. As in, do your post notifications get sent successfully?

Thanks,
Devon