There are a few unique pieces of terminology that we would like to introduce you to, in this post. It will help you to understand how the emails are stored and when they are sent.
TERMS
Lets start off with the input fields you will encounter in the admin area
- Owner – This is the plugin which generated the email. Leave blank or enter the default “wordpress”
- Email To – Enter a coma separated list of valid email addresses
- Hook – WordPress action hooks
- Max Send – Max amount of times this email is allowed to be sent
- Times Sent – Times this email has been sent
- Tracker – Important for plugins. This way they can track their email and delete it if necessary
- Email Agent – currently we support php mail function and the wordpress wp_mail funciton. Its how the email is sent. Use the default “wp_mail” if unsure
HOOKS
This is a wordpress construct that BePro Email has added to. So in short, there are “action hooks” in your wordpress installation already. Many plugins also create their own “hooks”.
Hooks are events that happen during a page load. Functions attach themselves to these hooks, and get called when the hook event occurs. Hooks include, recognizing a registration or login occurred. There are hundreds if not thousands of hooks in wordpress
Plugins which integrate with BePro Email, create their own hooks. Our BePro Listings plugin integrates with BePro Email. It also has hundreds of hooks, indentifying important things like a new directory submission to recognizing that a page has loaded.
If the email has a hook, it will be sent when the hook event occurs. If it does not, then it will simply sit there. This is important for plugins which want to store the email with BePro Email, but need to enter custom information that’s dynamic and beyond the reach of BePro Email.
TRACKER
If you are creating an email for wordpress, then a tracker is not necessary. However, plugins could add any amount of emails and need a way to identify them. You can imagine that after you have changed the title, body, and email description, there is little of the original email left to reference. The tracker provides a unique identifier for the email, that a plugin can use to quickly reference a particular email
We expose this option for you to edit, in cases where you have purposely or accidentally deleted an email and want to re-add it. Thing is, if you add it without the correct tracker, when the plugin which uses the tracker is deleted, it wont have the correct tracker to reference. This makes it impossible for plugins to delete their emails during de-activation.
SHORTCODES AKA PLACEHOLDERS
As with any email, there are various dynamic aspects which would be nice to enter. When the email is being sent, the placeholders are replaced with actual live data. Here are the placeholders which come with BePro Email
[username] [user_email] [user_firstname] [user_lastname] [display_name] [admin_username [admin_user_email] [admin_user_firstname] [admin_user_lastname] [admin_display_name] [website_url]
You can place these in the title, body, or email to fields. Obviously, you should only put email related placeholders in the “Email To” field (if you expect it to work).
CONCLUSION
BePro Email is one of those plugins that make you wonder why its not part of the core wordpress isntallation. It adds notification emails to wordpress itself and any other plugin which integrates with it. In addition, you are able to add notification features to plugins that don’t currently have any. BePro Email is a must have for any wordrpess installation