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Version 1.3.0: Peter’s Collaboration E-mails for WordPress MU

Hi! This is the page for Peter’s Collaboration E-mails for WordPress MU. Starting from version 1.1.0, it is a forked version from the normal WordPress version of this plugin. Update: note that I have not updated this fork since before WordPress 2.8.

Note that this plugin uses some WordPress database functions that were introduced in WordPress MU 2.5, thus you need to at least be running that version of WordPress MU.

The purpose of this plugin remains the same: you can define “approvers” based on the Contributor user that wrote a post or based on the category assigned to the post. The approvers are thus e-mailed whenever there is a new post waiting to be approved. This way they don’t have to log in all the time to check for pending posts. Also, whenever a post is approved, the Contributor user is notified via e-mail.

The MU version of the plugin can be put in one of two places.

  • mu-plugins directory: This enables the plugin for all blogs without requiring any manual activation. Administrators can automatically start defining approver rules in the Settings > Collaboration e-mails menu. Note that they must visit this page at least once so that the plugin tables can be created.
  • plugins directory: The plugin must be activated on a per-blog basis. Then, approver rules can be defined.

For efficiency sake, in both scenarios, the relevant plugin tables are automatically removed whenever the blog is deleted (and in the latter scenario, also whenever the plugin is de-activated).

Download Version 1.3.0 of Peter’s Collaboration E-mails for WordPress MU [February 18, 2009: Added e-mails at the "pending-to-future" and "future-to-publish" transitions and synced with the 1.3.0 release of the normal WordPress version.]

Version 1.2.1 [January 3, 2009: Added .po and .mo files for translators and synced with 1.2.1 release of normal WordPress version.]

Version 1.1.0 [September 21, 2008: First MU version.]

Like this plugin? Vote for it in the wpmu.org plugin contest! Update: it came in third place in the wpmu.org plugin contest. Thanks to everybody for their support.

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14 Responses to “Version 1.3.0: Peter’s Collaboration E-mails for WordPress MU”

  1. September 21st, 2008 at 4:55 pm
    Boonika says:

    Thanks for such a nice plugin

  2. October 17th, 2008 at 10:42 am
    scott says:

    I cannot get this to email the admin after clicking "submit for review". I have set up just the top part, default moderators, of the plugin. Do I need to set up any other part? I’ve tried it in the MU plugins folder, and just the plugins folder. I would prefer it to just be in MU plugins folder. This will be perfect if I can get it working, just what I need. Any suggestions?

  3. October 17th, 2008 at 10:56 am
    Peter says:

    If you have visited the Settings > Collaborations menu for the blog(s) in question, then everything should be activated. Have you tried other e-mail functions on your site? The plugin uses the built-in WordPress mail function, which in turn uses PHP’s mail() function by default. This means that if PHP’s mail() function hasn’t been configured properly, no WordPress e-mails will work.

  4. October 17th, 2008 at 11:46 am
    scott says:

    now working. however, i had to activate for all. it could have been a spam filter issue too… thanks for this plugin!

  5. January 1st, 2009 at 11:11 am
    Michael says:

    Hi! I’d like to translate this plugin into French. Could you modify it to use .po / .mo files? Thank you very much!

  6. January 3rd, 2009 at 11:57 am
    Peter says:

    Hi Michael, I’ve now released version 1.2.1, which includes the relevant .po and .mo files. Let me know when your translation is ready. Thanks for your help!

  7. May 4th, 2009 at 11:42 am
    Chris says:

    Peter – great plugins – will really fit nicely in our K-8 blogs for students – one question – your collaboration email plugin works great for us – students tag their post by subject and it goes to the teacher of that class for moderation- but trying to think of a way to use this for comments as well so that the comments from that post also go to that specific category’s admin? Thanks for great work!

    Reply from Peter: That’s certainly possible, and some of the framework is in this plugin. You’d have to hook the code somewhere into the comment workflow. It would probably also be good to turn off the default comment e-mails and run that completely through your script. It’s not that difficult, but it’s at least a few hours of work, if not more.

  8. June 18th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
    Ryan says:

    Is there a way to set this plugin so it will email admin/editors when a page is edited or created instead of just posts?

    My apologies if this plugin already does this, but I have not found anything that would allow me to do this.

    Reply from Peter: By default the “Collaborator” role does not have the permission to create a page. However, if you tweak the permission system to allow that (and still force that user to “submit for review”), then the plugin will work with pages. Use the Capability Manager plugin to add or remove capabilities to existing roles (and also to add roles if needed).

  9. January 21st, 2010 at 7:18 am
    the Ramen Noodle says:

    I can’t set the default moderator(s).

    I’m running 1.3.0 on WordPress MU 2.9.1.1. I copied the plugin files to /plugins because I wanted it to show up in the WP plugins list. I activated it site-wide, and then I go into the backend of a chosen blog. I can see the settings page.

    I select a moderator from the drop-down list, checkmark Add, and then click Update. The page refreshes and a yellow line shows where an error message would usually be, and the line looks like the border from the error message div, but there is no error message and the selected email is not added to the list.

    Thank you for your help!

    Reply from Peter: If you’re putting the plugin in the /plugins folder, try using the normal version of the plugin, which has a few updates.

  10. February 14th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
    Jaace says:

    Hi Peter! Thanks for the plugin(s). I have a question about this one. I’m using WordPress MU 2.9.1.1 and I tried using the regular WordPress one and activating it site-wide. I then saw the link here and opted to put this one in the mu-plugins folder instead of the other one.

    I’m experience a strange error… I intermittantly get this upon submitting for review (either through edit or quick edit) on a white screen:

    Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in /home/designab/public_html/2kwmu/wp-content/mu-plugins/peters_collaboration_emails_mu.php on line 125

    Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /path/to/my/site/wp-content/mu-plugins/peters_collaboration_emails_mu.php:123) in /path/to/my/site/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 868

    It’s weird because it’s happening sometimes…not all of the time. Also when I go back to the "Edit Pages" screen that lists all of them out, the status of the page is "pending" and the admin never receives the email.

    Any ideas on how to fix this?

    Reply from Peter: I would check to see whether it is looking up the correct database table (check the value of the variable $pce_db_group) and whether the table actually exists. Unfortunately, I haven’t been mirroring the changes of the normal plugin with the mu-plugins version since before WP 2.8, so the normal plugin in the “plugins” folder is your best bet. Unless some related project work comes up, I don’t plan on officially releasing an updated MU-ready version of the plugin until WP 3.0 when MU and non-MU are merged.

  11. February 14th, 2010 at 3:30 pm
    Jaace says:

    UPDATE:
    It turns out that if I (as the admin) go to the Settings > Collaboration Emails screen and just view it, not save anything (the General admin is already checked) then I never get this error and everything works as normal.

    The error only seems to happen if I as the admin NEVER visit the Settings > Collaboration screen on the specific blog that a Contributor is saving a page as a pending review status.

  12. February 19th, 2010 at 2:21 pm
    Glen says:

    Peter –
    This is simply BRILLIANT! I can’t believe that this isn’t a regular feature in WPMU! This just saved me a HUGE headache with a site that now has over 50 Bloggers.
    Top Marks, my friend! FYI, this does appear to work fine in WPMU for Joomla. I will let the forums at corePHP know this as well as the forums at Joomla.org.
    GREAT WORK!
    GE

  13. February 19th, 2010 at 2:51 pm
    Glen says:

    additional note…actually, it errors out when adding new people to the list, however it DOES send out an email (in my case to admin) when a contributor has a pending post, which is great!
    GE

  14. April 24th, 2010 at 7:43 am
    Oliver Quinlan says:

    Hi Peter,

    Thanks for a great plugin. I can’t seem to get it to work on my MU installation, when I try to activate it just says it has triggered a fatal error. Any ideas what I could try?

    Reply from Peter: Unfortunately, I haven’t looked at this plugin with MU since before WordPress 2.8 and probably won’t again until at least 3.0. I simply don’t run any MU installs at the moment. If anybody has any tips in the meantime, please post them :)

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