Satollo bbPress is an extension for bbPress to have better notifications and few other features.
The Sender Details
Notifications are sent by bbPress with your site title as sender name and noreply@yourdomain.ext” as address.
In the plugin administrative panels you can set a different name and email address for the sender. Usually it’s important to use an existent address and within you site domain. For example, satollo@gmail.com is not a good address, while forum@satollo.net is a good address. Few providers require the address to be a real mailbox.
Generally use a existent address help in get back replies from users, even if the address is “noreply”.
The sender name, other than contain the blog name, could contain the word “forum” or whatever you like more.
User Notifications
bbPress let users to subscribe to forums and to topics. Forum subscriptions produce a notification for each new topic within a subscribed forum, while topic subscriptions produce a notification for each new reply to subscribed topics.
Since the standard bbPress notifications are very simple, the plugin lets to configure a more complex message with few placeholders to make it dynamic.
Notifications can be written as pure plain text or as HTML (so formatting tags can be used). When you choose the HTML format, you can edit them writing directly the HTML code or using the well known (even if with more limitations) WordPress editor.
Placeholders
Available placeholders that can be used inside your new notifications are:
- _URL_ the topic addressto be used to build a link to the topic and its replies page
- _AUTHOR_ the author name (of a topic for new topic notifications and of a reply for new reply notifications)
- _CONTENT_ the full content of the topic or the reply being notified
- _TITLE_ the topic title (replies have not title)
- _BLOGURL_ the address of the blog
Administrative Notifications
Since bbPress added the forum subscriptions, this feature is less useful, anyway it lets the administrator to get notified for each new created topic (not for replies). It’s almost the same thing to subscribe to all of your forums.
The email to notify and the message to be sent can be configured. Message can contain the same placeholders of standard notification (see above).
Note that, differently from notifications sent by bbPress which are a single message with all subscribers in BCC, this administrative notification is send directly to the configured email. This notification, being administrative, does not uses the sender configurations, but it’s sent as WordPress does for any other blog notifications (like the comment ones).
Short Codes
satollo_bbpress_topics
This short code creates a list of latest replies for a topic (that must be referenced by id in the short code). The list will contain the author avatar and the excerpt of his reply. Example of usage:
[[satollo_bbpress_topics max=”7″ words=”30″ topic_id=”3455″]]
Available parameters:
- topic_id (required) is the ID of the topic. To find it “edit” the topic and in the URL you’ll find “post=nnnn”: “nnnn” is a number and is the topic ID
- max (default: 5) is the max number of reply to list
- words (default: 25) is the number of words to be extracted from reply
Social Icons
The plugin has few social icon images inside that can be used to improve the notifications sent. To reference a social image, the placeholder _IMAGESURL_ can be used followed by a social network name and the .png extension.
For example, the URL to the Facebook icon is _IMAGESURL_/facebook.png
Social icon available are: facebook, twitter, paypal, pinterest, myspace, googleplus, skype, youtube.