The Comment to Email Wordpress Plugin allows you to reply to a comment and have your response be sent simultaneously to the commenter via email and posted as a regular comment in your comment section, killing two birds with one stone.
As some of you have probably noticed, I like to try to email commenters personally. The main reason I do this is because I assume that the commenter is not going to be checking back routinely to see if I posted a response.
The only problem with emailing a response is that it takes the conversation away from your comment section, meaning anyone else who has the same problem or question will miss the answer. Because of this I would find myself copying and pasting my emails back into the comments, which is just tedious. So I decided to create a better solution.
How it Works
It’s quite simple. After installing the plugin:
- Under the Comments menu select ‘Reply to Comments’.
- Click ‘Reply’ on the comment you wish to reply to.
- Enter your message with WYSIWYG editor.
- Click Send.
- An email is sent to the commenter and your email is posted as a comment.
Additionally you have the option to BCC yourself on the message so you can get a copy to put into your sent items in your email program.
Features In the Works
As I said, I just quickly whipped this up today and I’m working on another idea at the time being, so I couldn’t do everything I wanted yet. Here’s what I’m hoping to add to it in the near future:
- Ability to provide independent footers for the email and for the comment. This will allow you to say “I’m going to post this email in the comments so that others can see our discussion” to the email, but not have it appear in the actual comment.
- Adding a flag in the subject line of the BCC email so that you can setup a message filter in Outlook, Thunderbird, etc to automatically have the BCC’d email drop into your sent items. This way it will be as if you sent it from your own email like normal.
- What else can you think of?
Install/Configuration
- Download the plugin
- Upload the plugin to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
- Under the ‘Plugins’ menu in your WP Admin, click ‘activate’ next to the plugin.
- Note: The email that messages are sent as (and bcc’d to) is the email address in your user profile in Wordpress. You can change this under the ‘Users’ menu.
Download
Test it out and if you run into any problems, drop me a note in the comments.
Download - Version 0.4 (Requires Wordpress 2.5+)
Download - Version 0.2 (For Wordpress 2.0 - 2.3)
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