Global Override
Multisite
Reminders
Updated
The Better Notifications for WP Reminders add-on allows you to send a notification if a user hasn’t published/updated a post, page, or custom post type after a set amount of time.
It also allows you to send a transactional reminder notification if a user hasn’t logged in after a set amount of time.
This add-on is useful if you run a site that requires users to publish or update content on a regular basis. For example, if you run an educational institute, you might require that students publish or update their homework or lab notes posts on a daily basis – with this add-on, reminding them to do that is easy.
New Notifications
Update Reminder Notifications
After installing and activating the add-on, a new set of notifications will appear in the ‘Notification For’ selection box. These are:
- Post – Update Reminder
- Page – Update Reminder
- ‘Custom Post’ – Update Reminder
Selecting one of these new notifications will then allow you to set a number of hours, days, weeks, or months after which the notification should be triggered if a post / page / custom post hasn’t been updated. The amount of time entered must be in the form of a whole number (e.g. 2) and not numbers with decimal places (e.g. 0.5) in order to work correctly.
A single notification will be sent once triggered and will not be repeated. Instead, it will only send out a notification once. As a workaround to trigger multiple notifications for the same event, you can set-up multiple notifications, all with different frequencies.
Publish Reminder Notifications
- Reminder – New Post Reminder
- Reminder – New Page Reminder
- Reminder – New Custom Post Type Reminder
Selecting one of these new notifications will then allow you to set a number of hours, days, weeks, or months after which the notification should be triggered if a post / page / custom post hasn’t been published. The amount of time entered must be in the form of a whole number (e.g. 2) and not numbers with decimal places (e.g. 0.5) in order to work correctly.
A single notification will be sent once triggered and will not be repeated. Instead, it will only send out a notification once. As a workaround to trigger multiple notifications for the same event, you can set-up multiple notifications, all with different frequencies.
Login Reminder Notifications
- User Login Reminder
A single notification will be sent once triggered and will not be repeated. E.g. If you want to let users know that they haven’t logged in for a month, then it will not repeat for every month that they haven’t logged in. Instead, it will only notify them after the first month. As a workaround, you can set-up multiple notifications to achieve this, with different frequencies.
Shortcodes
You can use any of the post, page, or custom post shortcodes as normal in the Subject and Message Body fields for the post, page and custom post type reminder notifications. You can view all the shortcodes currently available here.
For the User Login Reminder notification, you can use the [user_last_login] shortcode to output the date and time they last logged in, which will be formatted in the date and time settings you have specified in WordPress > Settings.
Testing
If you’d like to test your reminder notifications ahead of time (i.e. not have to wait until the specified time for them to trigger automatically), you can trigger them manually by going to these URLs for each reminder type. After visiting this URL, it will return you to the WordPress Dashboard. Remember to replace https://www.domain.com with your own.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 | // Test User Login Reminder https://www.domain.com/wp-admin/?debug_userlogin=true // Test Update Post/Page/CPT Reminder https://www.domain.com/wp-admin/?debug_update-reminder=true // Test New Post/Page/CPT Reminder https://www.domain.com/wp-admin/?debug_create-reminder=true |
Important Notes
- The time and date that a user last logged in or when a post was published/updated is only recorded once the add-on has been installed and activated. As WordPress doesn’t record this information by default, a notification cannot be created to retrospectively send for events that occurred prior to when the add-on was installed.
- This add-on uses the built in WordPress cron to schedule reminder notifications and and as such, requires that the site is visited to ensure that the cron runs. More information about this standard WordPress behaviour is available to read on WordPress.org here. Additionally, I’ve written a support document which can help in troubleshooting and fixing WP Cron issues, available here.
Questions?
Still have a question? Ask me a pre-sales question here and i’ll gladly help.
