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
Update on 08-October-2010
- Message text length issue fixed. There was a bug whereby the message text length was restricted to 100 characters reported in newer versions of WordPress
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