Contact Commenters WordPress Plugin Released!
Ajith | Dec 2008 | WordPress Plugins
Okay! Enough is enough! Here is my first WP plugin – the Contact Commenters Wordpress Plugin – which has been just approved by WordPress extend team and available for download now. I have been exploring the WordPress platform and its extensibility aspects lately and this little baby is the first visible outcome of my experiments.
How can Contact Commenters plugin help you?
Well, it is a very small plugin that provides you a simple interface from your WordPress Admin Panel Manage tab through which you can:
- Search and filter for your top commenters, new commenters, those who have been inactive for the past few days, commenters of a particular post, commenters during a date range etc
- Send personalized emails (no auto responders) to selected commenters either in BCC mode or as individual mails
- Send quick mails to your contacts not just commenters (e.g. send greetings, inform them about your new services, blog contests etc)
- Reminds you of your last 10 commenters’ blog URLs, which probably you should be visiting and commenting as well
Installation and Usage
The plugin is so easy to install. Just like any other WordPress plugin, you may Download Contact Commenters, copy the contents of the zip file into your WordPress plugin directory and activate the plugin from your Admin panel. No painful settings to be done, no changes done to your WordPress DB and most importantly absolutely no performance issues on your host or your blog. It uses minimal resources only while sending the mails.
As I mentioned earlier, you can access the plugin features via the Manage tab and this is how the screens look like.
Contact Commenters Plugin – Screen 1
Contact Commenters Plugin – Screen 2
(The third step actually send the emails)
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Kim for helping me with the beta testing of this plugin. I also appreciate Chetan’s twitter help on how to upload the plugin to the SVN repository.
Feedback & Support
I request all of you to provide your valuable feedback on my first plugin. You may also log your support requests here which will be taken up as time permits.
Please bookmark this post if you find it interesting! Any Wordpress.org members may take a moment to rate the plugin as well!
Update on 01-June-2009
- On Wordpress 2.7 and above, the plugin features can be accessed via the Tools tab on the Admin panel (instead of the Manage tab in older releases)
- A bug related to the input box heights (being too short) has been fixed without changing the release version. Please download the latest plugin zip file
Update on 14-October-2009
- Tested for Wordpress 2.8.2
- A bug related to slashes appearing in mail content has been fixed. Please download the latest plugin zip file
- Another bug of sending multiple mails in certain situations – if the commenter used multiple names but same email ID to comment – has been fixed as well
Update on 29-April-2010
- The [NAME] tag can now be added to the email subject as well. Thanks to the suggestion by Vince Samios in his Contact Commenters review
@Da Vinci, ‘unable to fill’ in the info means what? Actually a lot of people are using it with only minor bugs reported..
Could you be more specific?
Now it works great. Thanks!
Pawel Zinkiewicz’s last blog post… Optymalizacja Wordpress’a
[...] Contact commenters plug-in is an awesome plug-in which helps you a lot in recalling your visitors to your blog. It helps you to contact those commenters of your blog who have been inactive for a while and also for reminding your readers for anything. [...]
This is a wonderful plugin. i do not know how the hell I missed it all these days. I will be testing this out soon and might even write a review
thanks Ajith!
[...] Contact Commenters is the Wordpress plugin which makes this process. You can do it instantly and send mass mails to thousands of your commentators instantly. I made use of the same for my anniversary contest announcement and found it working successful for more number of mails. [...]
@Raju, thanks for your comments…
@Pavan, @Harish, thanks a lot for the review/coverage…
This is a great application. Unfortunately I have been unable to use it. I thought it might be because I am running it on 2.71 but I have encountered a number of people using that version of WP who seem to be doing fine with it.
The problem I have is that the fields for entering the information on both the step one and step two pages are showing up extremely short. While the data gets entered, you can not see what the data is to be able to make any corrections. I was wondering if there is something I can do to correct that.
I have a link to a screen capture provided below
http://greeneconomypost.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/concomment.gif
Thanks
Tracey
@Tracey, Thanks for reporting the alignment issues. I am yet to install Wordpress 2.7.X. Once I do that, I will certainly look into the same.
Sometimes it happens with certain browsers (On Chrome it had a problem earlier)
Wow, a cool Plugin, You are osome dude.. Great going
looking forward for more such cool plugins from you 
sir, do you have a new version of contact commenters??? because i upgraded my wordpress version to 2.7.1 and the contact commenters plugin doesn’t working properly. pls help. thanks!
@TechNald, I am sorry but I haven’t upgraded to the latest version of WP. What exactly is the problem that you are facing?
Hi Ajith, I was installing a new blog with most featured plugins and installed this, later in installation manual i saw your url and remembered something. I remembered that you had once won a 1 month 125×125 banner on my ex-blog webdotgeek.com, the contest was sponsored by BloggingKid remember? for which i had provided banner space before I had finally sold off WDG to some guy who didnt even bother to keep it alive and paid me $9 less than he promised. That blog has gone off my hand, but now im making a new blog.
However, Its Great to see you make something useful. I will tell you about my new blog too when its launched officially. thanks!
@Abhishek, thank you for your comments and congratulations on the new blogging venture. I am glad that some of my stuff here are useful to you…
(Sorry, I could not utilize the ad spot because I didn’t have a great banner with me)
Hi,
If any of you are still having a problem with the text input fields being too small to type into in WP 2.7.1, there is a simple solution: Open the file “contact_commenters_manage.php” and remove the line “height: 12px;” (line 232, after the line saying “fieldset input {”), save the file and replace it on your server.
Hope this helps!
MT
@MT, thanks a lot buddy for the fix. Others, please let me know if it works well for you. If so, I might put the fix into the baseline.
I am unable to verify it myself as I am still not on 2.7.1
Cheers
Finally I put the fix for the alignment problem
I just need some clarification.
For option (Those who commented for the very first time in the last few days selected).
Example, the first time I run this is everyone a new commenter? Or does the plug know who is new for say today?
Thanks for this great plug.
mrlayance,
This particular option lists people who have commented newly on your blog for the last ’selected number’ of days. The plugin does not remember whether you have run this query in the past.
E.g. If a person commented on your blog 8 days ago, his email Id will be listed as query output when you choose 10 days as well as 15 days.
This option is useful if you are sending acknowledgements to new commenters on a particular day of every week or month.
This is great plugin, thanks for your efforts!
Thanks for an awesome WordPress plugin. A valuable upgrade could include the ability to have a “Do Not Contact” section on the plugin admin page. Then when we “Contact All commentors” the plugin would read the Do Not Contact folder and not send to those commentors.
Clayton´s last blog post… Somebody Boot me!
Some commentators actually hate receiving emails liKe this. They’re paranoid that it leads to spamming of their email accounts which is why I removed Comment Relish from my site and installed Comment Redirect. So far so good, no complaint from folks.
One thing I like about the plug-in though, is the fact that it actually lists the urls of your commentators in one place so you can visit them one by one and hopefully leave good comments there too.
P.S: Oh my God! I just had a brainstorm. I’ve been looking for a way to run a blog contest and your plug-in is just the tool I need to get it done. You’re a genius man. It’s going to be like one of them contest where the commentator with the most comments wins a prize and a link in my dofollow blogroll. With your plug-in I can monitor the commentators from the date of commencement of the contest to the date of the contest’s end. So excited.
That is a very handy plugin, enabling one to easily target your audience with well placed marketing material. Impressive for your 1st project, congratulations on a job well done and may there be many more to follow!
Hi,
Great plugin I must say. I just tried it on my blog as a way of alerting my past commentators that my blog was once again nofollow free with comment luv and keyword luv also installed.
Unfortunately repeat commentators got the emails 5 times or 6 times etc all depending on how many comments they had left on my blog.
It would be really nice if any future updates has a feature to remove duplicate emails before mass sending of emails.
Thanks once again for a really great plugin
Strictly Online Biz´s last blog post… SOB’s Top 5 Wordpress Plug-in Alternatives
@Bryan,
As I commented on your blog, duplicates get added only if some people are using different name (but the same email address) to comment. Morever, you have a chance to remove duplicates, using the ‘Remove Selected’ button, before sending.
Fixed this bug related to duplicate mails
[...] so happens I was using Contact Commenters plug-in for the first time as a means of alerting you all about new developments/changes to the [...]
Hey its now am seeing this plugin of yours. Gonna try it. In fact I was just looking for a plugin to be able to contact commentators in group. I googled and find this… I clicked…was drinking some coffee and didn’t look at the link…I landed on dollarshower…
And I said..hey I know this blog…I check and hey its dollar shower lol.
Used the plugin and really appreciate the sizes of the fields being fixed!
After sending an email the program stated that it had been saved. Can I access the saved info?
@Clayton, the info saved are only the subject and the the email text that was used for the last successful dispatch. This will automatically appear pre-filled next time you want to use the feature.
Well
Now i have installed it, And i think i like it =)
Now i will learn how it works…
Thank you and goodnight all.
Thanks for trying it Pia… please provide your feedback
Thank you for this informative post. I always love reading about new tips and techniques for increasing the popularity of my websites. I look forward to reading more from you in the future!
Hey Amazing plugin Ajith. I have been using top commentator plugin which shows me all the stats I needed to see who all are commenting and top commentator for a week and for a month and so on..
Though this plugin is much better as it has more features then Top commentator plugin.
Kudos to you
Thanks Harsh…
I like your plug-in, but wish the escape characters did not show up in email (it can be hard to write without using apostrophes, etc.) – those are kind of a hint that the email isn’t as personal as one might like it to be.
@Holly, are you seeing any escape characters in the email body?
Yes, I am. Feel free to drop by, leave a comment, and I’ll test it on you.
Any time I use an apostrophe, it looks like this:
It\’s
Not sure about other characters; given this, I try not to use any special characters because I don’t know how it’s going to look on the receiving end. So if you could fix that, I’d be a really happy camper. See – people who know me KNOW I’m using a plug-in when they see stuff like this, because I’m a writer – and I don’t make that kind of typo!
This plug in sounds great. Does it only work with Word Press?
@Mike, it’s a WordPress plugin alone…
That is what I figured. I feel that I am not doing myself any favors by staying with blogger. I feel that I am missing out on some things that I need.
will it work with wordpress 2.8.4
Yes. Please download the latest version
[...] You can get old ones back. Hussein talks about getting old commentators back using a plugin by Ajith. If you use this the right way I really think you can get a lot of your previous commentators back [...]
[...] Contact Commenters is one of those plug-ins that can get you in trouble, unless you use a little common sense. It [...]
thanks for sharing will install it now
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Halleluja! Got it to work, finally! Awesome, thank you!
This looks interesting; as 2.9 was a significant update, can you update the WP page to ensure there is compatibility, or shoot me an email directly? I’m not subscribing to updates here. Thanks!
@Ari, didn’t get a chance to work on the plugin yet… I hope it doesn’t have any issues with 2.9
Your Contact Commenters plugin sounds great. Can’t wait to give it a try. Could make my life a lot easier. Thanks.
[...] days. You can thank (or blame) WordPress plugin developer Ajith Edassery for his invention called Contact Commenters, which was the impetus for a customized albeit automated email message sent via my blog server to [...]
Hey Ajith I think I’m visiting your blog for the first time and I must say you have done a fabulous job here on D$. I’m a fan of your blog now
Thanks Simran for being supportive
Hi Ajith
I tried it on my site footballkerala.com i tried mailing, initially it showed some text limit 100 in boy message and dint get the mail.. later i reduced the bodytext and then the mail was through, but hasnt received it yet. does it take long ?
Hi Mohan,
I have tested it up to 2.8.2 and expect it to work with your version as well. In fact, there is no text limit of 100 anywhere. The mail delivery must have failed due to any SMTP configuration issues on your site. Can you check if you are able to send mails from other scripts (such as your own comment moderation alerts etc)
Too late to read this post
.
That is a very handy plugin, enabling one to easily target your audience with well placed marketing material. Impressive for your 1st project, congratulations on a job well done and may there be many more to follow!
[...] Contact Commenters- This is such a great resource! This allows you to send a message to all commenter’s on a certain post, see which reader has posted the most comments in a specific period of time and more! [...]
Hey Ajith, congratulations for your first project! That is something that I’m looking for, but a little bit powerful, so here are some suggestions just in case you intend to give a plus into your plug-in. Here are some of my needs just to have an idea.
1 – It would be interesting to have in the menu “Reject|Quick Edit|Delete…” the option “E-mail”, so I would e-mail from the admin area (Comments) to this specific commenter without going to the step 1;
2 – In the step 2, it would be amazing to have a database where we would store each mail template. It would be good to have e-mail for different languages or different subjects. So, we would call them from a dropdown list or other;
Cheers.
@Lucato,
Thanks for your suggestions. I liked the 1st one. That may add value when you want to send a quick mail to an individual. Let me see how easy it is to implement. As for 2, though it may be a convenient feature, the whole idea behind the plugin was to avoid DB usage. However, templates are a good thign. Let me give it a thought as well.
(Due to lack of time, I wouldn’t be immediately on them)
Thank you once again!
Hi Ajith, thank you for your reply.
Yup the 1st one is a quick way and the 2nd one unfortunately involves DB usage, anyway is an useful feature. Let’me tell you in my case just to give you one example how would I use the 2nd one:
In my blog that is in two languages I use to give visitor credits for iStockphoto to download images, vectors and so on. So, when a visitor place a comment, I would click on the “e-mail” link and would have stored e-mail templates in the database for each language, so I would pick one template from the dropdown list or other method and edit just the code I send to each visitor and send the e-mail. These templates would have the e-mail subject, accept html to place signature with images, and in its body accept codes like [name], [post], etc. Well, something like that just to you have an idea about the suggestion #2.
Have a nice weekend and take your time.
Hi! Looks awesome, would love to use – but does it work on 2.9.2?
Thanks!
2.9.2, yes. I can’t vouch for it on 3.0, because I had a disastrous experience with 3.0 and couldn’t get IT working. But 2.9.2? This works fine on it.
thanks! about to give it a go on 2.9.2 then. hope it doesn’t interfere with other comment plugins (subscribe to comments, greg’s length limiter, or anything else i might be leaving out)
@Holly,
I appreciate it. As for 3.0, I need time.. As you probably saw, I have been irregular on posting as well.. Too busy.
You have been awesome in supporting the plugin and queries related to the same
Thanks, Ajith. I think it’s a great plug-in, and I’m happy to support it and recommend it. Don’t you worry about 3.0 on my account – once burned, twice shy. I’m sticking with 2.9.2 for the foreseeable future! But I’m sure there are others who could benefit from your making it work on both (hint, please don’t break it for those of us who are NOT upgrading!)
does not work for me at all
i’m on 2.9.2, it installs fine, i fill everything out, but it wont send emails at all.
just says, “Your email message was sent to 0 commenter(s).”
this is for various selections, and even the option of entering your own “quick email” of up to 5.
any ideas?
i’m able to send emails otherwise.
@Julie, are your other mail enabled plugins (subscribe to comments etc) working fine? Usually, there will not be any issue at all with this Plugin below WP 3.0
Is your email set up properly in your WordPress installation? (I know, it’s one of those “Is your PC plugged into the wall” type questions, but I have to ask. I recently had to reinstall everything, and mine’s NOT, and I would have thought it would be – it’s just not something I thought to go back and check, you know?)
Yes, I think the email is fine – it works with other plugins, actually even with Contact Commenter, which is another similar plugin. I have smtp enabled (if that changes anything?).
Unless you are referring to specific settings needed by this plugin? Let me know which ones, I’d be glad to check those specifically. I really like this plugin, and especially love the feature that gives you a list of all your commenters’ blogs. I’d be thrilled to be able to get this working. Thanks.
Thanks for the quick reply, Ajith! Yes, all other mail plugins are just fine. And I have smtp enabled (if that changes anything?). Have you ever had this happen before? I’m not even sure where to start, any suggestions?
I also met the same problems…
How to figure it out?
This should be simple, I tried to highlight and copy/paste all the email IDs in the second stage window and paste them into a plain text file, as a list. It just does not work! Every thing gets pasted except that all important list of the commenters I’ve emailed.
Creating this list is important… any advice how to do this please??
@Richard,
Copying the list needs to be a new feature. At the moment the plugin doesn’t support it. I shall look into the possibilities of including this feature in the next release.
Thank-you, godd luck with your future developements
Another thought … some basic HTML formatting would be really nice and the abiulity to add an image to the mail content.