Devon Ostendorf

Hi Steven,

I’m sorry that the suggestions didn’t help. Thanks for the additional info about the cancel and restart links not working. It may well be related. I wonder if you have a database user permissions error of some sort. I do not know how this would have happened but I wonder if the (MySQL) database account you used, when installing your site, is able to insert rows into the Post Notif custom tables but cannot update them? Or perhaps this issue is only affecting the post_notif_notif table.

I honestly don’t know how the permissions would have gotten mangled in this way, without direct human intervention, but, as I said before, unfortunately, I am really grasping at straws here, and am assuming (although I know that is always dangerous! 🙂 ) that it is a permissions issue of some sort, specific to your site set up, as opposed to a general code issue with the plugin. I say that only because I have only heard from you and a couple of others about similar issues. (Please don’t take this as me minimizing your issue the frustration it is causing you; I want everyone who wants to use Post Notif to have a good experience and it eats at me when I cannot find solutions for issues people encounter!)

Anyway, would you please let me know what you find if you are able to check the WordPress DB owners’ permissions on the post_notif_notif table?

Thanks,
Devon

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 8 years, 6 months ago by Devon Ostendorf.

Hi heatherbodlak,

Thanks for trying out Post Notif (and for the kind words!).

Though some widget-formatting options were recently added to the plugin (in v1.1.5), I acknowledge they merely scratched the surface of the changes one might wish to make to the widget.

The double-edged sword of WordPress theming allows for an infinite variety of appearances for sites built with WordPress, but makes it difficult for plugin authors, whose plugins render visible components, to ensure everything looks good in EVERY theme out there.

If you have access to and are comfortable with directly modifying your file server contents, you can try adding CSS to your (theme’s) stylesheet (../wp-content/themes/[THEME NAME]/style.css); something like the following should left-align the Submit button with the input fields above it (you may need to experiment with the number of pixels to get it just right):

#id_frmSubscribe ul button#id_btnSubmit {
	margin-left: -39px;
}

Alternatively, if you’d like to modify a plugin file, instead, you can edit ..wp-content/plugins/post-notif/includes/views/widget.php, replacing line 26 (<ul> with <br />) and removing line 28 (</ul>) entirely. The major difference, with this approach, is that you’ll have to re-apply this change each time you update Post Notif to a new version.

As for increasing spacing between the two input fields, you can add something like this (adjusting the number of pixels however looks best to you) to your stylesheet:

#id_txtEmailAddr {
	margin-top: 15px;
}

Hope this helps,
Devon

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Devon Ostendorf.

Hi chrisgarn,

Thanks for trying out Post Notif. I’m sorry to hear that the preference management functionality is not working for you.

In an attempt to recreate the issue, I subscribed to your site, via the link included in your post, but never received a confirmation email. When you have a chance, would you please perform the “Resend Confirmation” action on my row (my email address should be pretty apparent 🙂 ) on the Post Notif >> Manage Subscribers page? I’d like to see how the literal (personalized) URLs are being formed by Post Notif, running in your environment.

When you say “When I get the email to choose which categories I am subscribed to, the link just takes me to the home page”, do you mean that after successfully subscribing (via the widget), confirming (via the link in the confirmation email), (as an author/admin) sending a post notification, and THEN (as a subscriber) clicking on the link (in the post notification email) to manage your category preferences, you are taken to the home page? But when you initially confirm your subscription you DO see (and are able to modify??) the set of categories you’re subscribed to?

It is odd that both confirmation and unsubscription work for you but preference management does not. FYI, unsubscription does not send anything to the (ex)-subscriber – it merely deletes them entirely from the database and should display to them (on the page clicking the unsubscribe link redirects them to) the unsubscribe message you’ve defined in Settings >> Post Notif.

Thanks,
Devon

Hi oekoplatt and wbrzosko,

I wanted to let you both know that I’ve just released Post Notif v1.2.0-2 BETA (available from: https://devonostendorf.com/projects/post-notif-1-2-0/), which includes both the batch configuration functionality and logic to handle avoiding PHP script timeouts during the post notification send process.

If one or both of you are willing to test this out in your own development and/or test environments, I would tremendously appreciate your feedback!

Please note that if you happen to have applied v1.2.0-1 BETA, you’ll need to manually decrement the post_notif_db_version (in the options table) back down to 5
(it was updated to 6 in 1.2.0-1 BETA and 1.2.0-2 BETA makes additional changes to default settings and custom table schema).

Thanks,
Devon

Hi Mathias,

Thanks for giving Post Notif a try! I’m sorry to hear you’re running into problems, however.

I can’t say I am familiar with the “frontier post settings” plugin, and, unfortunately, at the moment, I do not have time to investigate its inner workings. Further, I’m not sure I understand how you have Post Notif configured. It sounds like you have the “Send post notifications when post published” in Settings >> Post Notif set to “Yes (Auto)” but I am confused about your two prior sentences, as they seem to contradict one another:

” In the backend the custom field “send_notif_on_publish” is set to “no” and the post notif is shown as “manually”. ”

” When I create a new post in the backend the custom field “send_notif_on_publish” is set to “yes” and post notif is shown as “auto”. ”

By the “backend” are you referring to the database or the (WordPress) admin dashboard (i.e., the Edit Post page) or something else? 🙂

If you’d like to clarify this a bit, I’d like to try to help you get to a workable solution.

Thanks,
Devon

Hi umcms,

I’m sorry you’re running into problems receiving mail from Post Notif. Just to confirm, have you set “Email sender name” and “Email sender email address” (in the admin dashboard under Settings >> Post Notif) to an email address (and description) that your web host recognizes (i.e., one that is from the domain)?

I’ve taken a look at the Check Email plugin’s code and observed that it uses the wp_mail function (with similar headers) just as Post Notif does. Email delivery is, as I like to say, a black hole of misery, but hopefully we can get this working for you.

Thanks,
Devon

Hi margarit0,

Since I believe things are working well for you (thanks for the review, by the way!), I am going to go ahead and mark this as resolved.

Thanks,
Devon