Tempus Fugit

Mark Jaquith's personal blog

WP: Subscribe to Comments 2.0-alpha-5

This post pertains to the alpha test period for this plugin which ran until June 9th. As of June 9th, this code has been officially released and listed in the WordPress plugin repository.

Go here.

Comments

  3. Line 93 of subscribe-to-comments.php, you might want to change the string to:

    ‘You are subscribed to entries’

    Or then, you might want to investigate a bug — it displays you a subscribed to this entry when you are in fact subscribed to other entries.

  4. Denis,
    Are you logged in to WordPress? If you are logged in as a WordPress author, you will be marked as subscribed to every post of which you are the author.

    In order to fully test, you should log out of WordPress first.

  6. This is great. I’m a big fan of the original one, which I hacked to provide PEAR mail support. So I’ll have to do the same to yours! Also – I’m liking this comment-box, with str, em and so on. Is that your work, or someone else’s?

  7. #

    2 issues I am having with this plugin.

    1.) even though I am logged out, it still displays that I am subscribed to the post.

    I didn’t realize it was looking to cookies to identify me… I fixed that…

    I just visited your site, and I wasn’t shown as being subscribed.

    How could you visit the site I am working on????? How could you know where I am working on things? There isn’t a BLOG posted on fluentonline.com and it’s totaly unrelated to Fluent.

    What is IIS’s problem with the filename? It seems to me that if that doesn’t work, WordPress wouldn’t work.

    Dunno what to tell you here, but when I use the wp-subscription-manager.php file, i get a 404 error, even though its on the server and all. (yes, uploaded as text) If I change the name to wp_subscription_manager.php, it sees it, but I still get the call to undefined function even when changing everything to reference this new name…. even if i try and access the wp-subscription-manager.php direct, with no vars passed, i get a 404.

    Frustrating, to say the least.

  8. OK .. this is very strange….. playing around with a few ideas, if I add:

    echo “”;(no extra spaces – had to do that to get it to display)

    above the other code in the wp-subscription-manager.php file, it works like a charm. Apparently, Windoze IIS handles the:

    // need to declare these global;
    global $wpdb, $user_level, $sg_subscribe;

    if (stristr($_SERVER[‘PHP_SELF’], ‘wp-subscription-manager.php’)) {
    require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);
    sg_subscribe_start();
    $sg_subscribe->form_action = ‘wp-subscription-manager.php’;
    $sg_subscribe->standalone = true;

    stuff….

    different than an linux box. Of course, looking at it, the problem may be that I have globals off on this IIS box.

    with all the frustrations I have had in the recent months with IIS and PHP, all I can say is it sucks. Linux/Unix runs circles around IIS as far as php……. and you can bet I will be shifting all my accounts back to Linux…..

  9. Mac… I found your blog from the path in the error message you posted… the “qpc” blog. I’m clever like that. 😉

    I’m guessing the error has to do with how I am checking to see if wp-subscription-manager.php is being run directly or through WP… I’m going to change to a better way in the next release.

  12. I installed Subscribe to Comments 2.0-alpha-3. I appreciated the fact that you created a tab in the Options to allow some settings to be modified. Especially the strings that I was easily able to translate…
    BUT, after setting everything right, I decided to have a look at the /wp-admin/options.php page (you know the one page option catalog…) to see what other options I could set in my newly installed 1.5 WP edition… I made a few changes, but none concerning that plugin.
    Well, I might no be lucky, but when I returned to the subscribe to comments option page, all settings pertaining to Subscribe to Comments 2.0-alpha-3 where changed to the letter “a“. I had to do it all over again. Very annoying. I’m not really in the mood to try it a second time to see if I made a mistake or if it’s indeed a bug, but I’m mentioning it here so that other users can give it a close look and provide some constructive feedback. Of course I’ll be subscribed to that comment to see the follow-ups 😉
    Thanks for releasing this plugin by the way, this is greatly appreciated.

  13. I just installed the alpha 3 version, and when I enabled it, it completely “wiped” my admin interface until I move the plugin file. I’ve deactivated all my other plugins so that subscribe to comments is the only plugin. Any ideas? It’s been too long since I’ve done PHP for me to be of much use.

    The weblog itself displays fine when the plugin is activated, but once a comment is submitted, the commentor gets a blank page.

    Did I completely miss something?

    Thanks.

  14. Romain, the problem you have is likely related to a bug in WordPress 1.5 whereby the options.php page outputs its options with incorrect coding and so when you save them, they get garbled. I found this bug, reported it, and it was fixed here in 1.5.1

    Elwing, it could be an error in the upload. You need to make sure you upload the files as ASCII and not binary.

  15. Mark, quick question – does your plugin make use of WP’s default mail settings, or does it send it out manually itself? I ask because I really would prefer to use PEAR’s mail support – as mentioned above a few days ago.

  16. Will,
    It sends itself out manually itself. It uses this function, within the class.

    function send_mail($to, $subject, $message) {
    $subject = ‘[‘ . get_bloginfo(‘name’) . ‘] ‘ . $subject;
    $headers = "From: ".$this->site_name." site_email.">n";
    $headers .= "MIME-Version: 1.0n" . "Content-Type: text/plain; charset="" . get_settings(‘blog_charset’) . ""n";
    return mail ($to, $subject, $message, $headers);
    }

  18. Mark,

    Thanks for the tip, but I wgeted it directly from your site to the server, so don’t think that’s it. I turned on PHP debugging, and this is the error I get for trying to load the admin pages:
    Fatal error: Call to undefined function: sg_wp_head() in /path/to/wp/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments.php(741) : runtime-created function on line 1

    and the following when trying to submit a comment:
    Fatal error: Call to undefined function: send_notifications() in /path/to/wp/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments.php(736) : runtime-created function on line 1

    Any ideas based on that?

    Thanks!

  19. Getting an odd error when I activate the plugin and try to go to wp-subscription-manager.php:

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function: add_options_page() in /home/literal/public_html/blog/wp-content/plugins/wp-contactform.php on line 233

    I have Ryan Duff’s contact form plugin installed and running. When I deactivate it, your plugin works again.

    Any idea what might be going on here?

  20. Mark,
    I fixed my problem… In line 484 (end of hidden_form_fields), you only use <? and not <?php

    I have short tags turned off. Altered that, and it was fine.

  22. Doug,
    I think I see the problem. Try changing line 106, which should be:

    <?php do_action('admin_head', ''); ?>

    to this:

    <?php $sg_subscribe->sg_wp_head(); ?>

    Thanks for pointing this out!

    Edit: Sorry… that’s line 106 in wp-subscription-manager.php !

  23. Yowsa. Thanks for that. I was searching like mad in the plugin file to try to find that. 106 is a blank line, so, needless to say, I was a bit confused. *grin*

  24. Sweet. That was just the change needed.

    Now, if I could only get my stinking html to render right… For some bizarre reason, the live preview always shoots to the bottom of the page, the “Subscribe to Gravatar” checkbox never shows up and your subscription manager also likes to live dangerously down at the bottom…

  26. Ken, I’d suggest removing the “clear: both;” style rule that is added. It is needed for the default templates and doesn’t cause any harm on others, but it might not be working with your install. Basically, you should try to mimic the HTML that outputs your other form elements.

  27. Thanks for getting back to me, Mark! 🙂

    I commented out the style and class stuff in the P tags in all three instances of the plugin so that there’s only the P tag. It didn’t have an effect. 🙁

    And to make things even more interesting when, I switched themes to see if I get the thing. The result: no checkbox at all.

    Can you provide me with anymore suggestions please?

  30. Ken, You should move the subscribe checkbox function call above your preview area and into the fieldset… right under the submit button.

  32. Denis,
    Thanks for pointing that out. It seems to be a bug in the built-in WordPress function that takes a URI and generates a title post ID. I’ll try to get it fixed for WP 1.5.1 and see if I can’t find a workaround in the plugin until then. At least I can make the link correct, if not the text of the link.

  33. Mark, do you mind me asking whether you coded this comment form? (with the formatting options). Or did you use an external plugin?

  35. I don’t see any checkbox for the user to subscribe to a comment. Are they auto subscribed for each comment they make? How do they unsubscribe? I see no options for any of this.

  36. Bleh. Just read the post above about deleting cookies as I’m using Firefox. Is this the only time I need to do this?

  37. Todd, you won’t see the checkbox if you are logged in as the WP author of the post. All regular viewers should see it (I verified it by looking at your site). After subscribing to an entry, the checkbox on the entry will be replaced by a link to the subscription manager where users can manage their subscriptions. They also get a link at the bottom of each notification e-mail.

  38. looks cool. 😀
    have any issues been come across Alpha-3 so far? Is it safe to deploy on a live blog or what?
    when is the stable version scheduled to come out?

  39. Amit,
    There are some minor issues with Alpha-3 that have been resolved. I’ll be putting out Alpha-4 very soon, and I think that will be very close to a “release-worthy” verson. Of course, I’m going to wait to release it officially until WordPress 1.5.1 comes out, because there are a few minor bugs that are the fault of WordPress 1.5 and now the plugin.

  40. Congratulations!! It’s the best Plugin with the nicest GUI i ever have seen. The functionality is great and it works like a charm.
    Greetings from Lueneburg 😉

  41. Excellent! Are you considering ever putting in a feature to allow readers to subscribe to all comments? That’t the one thing I miss from MT. Readers could sign up to be emailed any time any comments were posted to any entry on the blog.

    Also, should there be anything the “manage>subscriptions” menu? I’ve signed up a test subscription but when I click that menu, it just shows the WordPress and “Get Firefox” logos.

  42. One more question:
    Can anyone tell me WHY my comment management screen looks fine in Firefox but not IE? Feel free to check it out at http://www.heathallyn.com

    I’m baffled. I’ve inspected the code until my eyes were bugging out, but I must be missing something. Basically in IE the divs don’t qutie line up right (but they do for all other pages except the comment management) and the text of my heading gets bigger than it is on the other pages of my site.

  43. Heath,
    For getting e-mail notifications of posts, I recommend the Subscribe2 plugin by Skippy. Actually, it looks like you have it installed!

    There are a few reasons why you might not see anything on the Manage > Subscriptions menu, and usually it’s related to bug 902 in WordPress 1.5… that’ll all get smoothed out by WP 1.5.1, at which time I’ll do an official release of this plugin.

    And as for IE CSS issues… I’d try setting all paddings and margins to 0 until everything lines up in both browsers and working from there. Getting CSS to look pixel perfect in two browsers is sometimes just a trial and error process.

  44. Hi,
    Thanks for updating this plugin… The initial stuff looks great!

    I just have one problem. When deleting comments using the subscription manager, I get the following error:

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function: ngettext() in /path_to/wp-subscription-manager.php on line 50

    Any ideas?

  45. Carsten,
    Hm, it appears that the ngettext() function was introduced in PHP 4.2, and WordPress should run on 4.1 and above, so I’ll have to find a workaround for that. Thanks! Alpha-4 will be coming out later today (just a lot of minor bugfixes).

  47. Alpha 4 is now available!

    Carsten, your server must have just disabled the function. No fear, I’ve changed it in alpha 4, so you won’t get that error anymore.

  49. I just installed this on my “WP 1.5 + Options Menu Patch” blog, and found I had to comment out subscribe-to-comments.php:747
    add_action(‘admin_head’, create_function(‘$a’, ‘global $sg_subscribe; $sg_subscribe->sg_wp_head();’));
    or I’d get:

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function: sg_wp_head() in /var/www/tbble.net/blog/wp-content/plugins/subscribe-to-comments.php(747) : runtime-created function on line 1

    instead of my blog. ^_^

    After that, trying to “Manage my subscriptions” gives me

    Fatal error: Call to undefined function: validate_key() in /var/www/tbble.net/blog/wp-subscription-manager.php on line 25

    which is weird, because it’s obviously happily other functions in the class.

    In both cases, the problem seems to be the existance of
    function blah() { ?>
    HTML CODE

  50. Paul,

    Thanks for the bug report. I made two small tweaks that should fix the problems you reported. Try downloading the plugin again!

  51. That’s better,although I’ve kept my “?>HTML<?php => echo” changes in place as well, as I’d actually tried this fix very early on in trying to work this out.

    The only problem I’m seeing now is that the “return to whence you came” link in the subscription manager gives “http://blog.tbble.org/archives/2005/04/14//” where the hidden ref field gives “http://blog.tbble.org/archives/2005/04/14/the-other-day’s-mew-20050412/”.

  52. Paul, that problem seems to be a result of having the curly parenthesis in the permalink. You seem to have lots of international characters as well, and WP is choking on them. I’m using built-in functions for this, and I guess they don’t hold up so well with such characters.

    The problems with ?>HTML<?php was that I accidentally let a few shorttags fall through (i.e. <? instead of <?php)… so that should be okay now.

    What I’m going to do with the ref link is just spit the ref value back instead of taking the one given by the ID, as that doesn’t seem to be working so well.

  53. Will this plugin still function for users who’ve set their browser up to reject all cookies?

    I’m sorry if this has already been addressed above, but page searches for “cookie,” “reject,” etc. didn’t yield any answers.

  54. Adam,
    Yes… it will still work! They won’t see the “you are subscribed” link on the entry page (because it obviously needs the cookie to know they are subscribed), but they can still access their subscriptions by clicking the link that is at the bottom of every comment notification e-mail they get.

  55. Ah. I didn’t notice the <?php fix because I’d modified those lines in my local copy. ^_^

    Yes, I’m very interesting in how various plugins handle international characters. It’s all UTF-8 so it mostly works, but every now and then I get surprised by something. (There’s an issue somewhere in the comment editing code, but I’m not yet sure if that’s a plugin or WordPress wronging me.)

    That’s not a curly-parenthesis, that’s a curly-apostrophe, and the permalinks are _supposed_ to be URLencoding that. I must have lost the plugin that fixed that for me in the 1.5 transition. Certainly the previous post (New Spamfiltering in place) doesn’t have that “return link” problem I mentioned.

    I’ll grab alpha-5 later and see how it goes. (Unless I already did… The link is still named alpha-4, and I didn’t look at the filename I got, I just tab-completed it.)

  56. I’ve two feature requests:

    1. Give the user an option to subscribe to a daily digest of comments rather than receiving an email for each comment
    2. Give the user an option to subscribe to the post’s updates, and add a button for the admin to notify subscribed users of updates

  58. I have an HTML validation request.
    For the next release, remember to change you & to & amp; (space added to force the display) in your URI so that pages still validate.
    I edited the plugin to fix that for my personnal usage, and it took me a while to figure where they were hidden. For those of you who want to edit this themselves before the next release, they are almost at the end of the plugin source.

  59. I’ll get that into the next release. Thanks Romain.

    Edit: alpha-5 should now be XHTML valid, let me know if you see any other errors.

    Denis, I think those are great ideas, although I’m not sure they’ll make it into this version. I’ll see what I can do.

  60. Optimization suggestion.

    Your plugin makes the following query:

    SELECT option_name FROM dev_options WHERE option_name = ‘sg_subscribe_settings’

    WordPress caches the results of the following early in the script:

    SELECT option_name, option_value FROM dev_options WHERE autoload = ‘yes’

  62. Denis, the only way I can see that this would happen is if the ‘sg_subscribe_settings’ option isn’t set as autoload=’yes’

    Could you check your database? I’m not manually querying it, but rather using the get_settings() funtion which should use the cached version if it exists.

    Cavemonkey50, the [manager_link] doesn’t work for the “not subscribed” version… only for the “subscribed” or “entry author” message. I guess it didn’t seem to me that someone who is not subscribed to the current entry would have any reason for going to the subscription manager. Seems they’d just follow the link from the e-mail or from the post to which they are subscribed. Thoughts?

  63. Well, that was part of the problem. I looked at the original file, and when I was modifying the plugin to fit my site design I accidentally removed the link code. I quickly fixed it up.

    By the way, great plugin enhancement! You have added every feature I wanted in the original plugin.

  65. I went through the comments but couldn’t find one that addressed the ‘problem’ I have.

    Why is the form pushing anything below it all the way to the bottom of the page? If it is the last thing before the /form, it is at the bottom. If anything is between it and the /form, it and anything below it is down there.

    How do I make it not do that? Annoying as heck. I have another plugin, the ‘contact form’, that also insists on being on the bottom.

  66. PaulaO, you likely have a layout with two floated columns that come before your main content. Edit the plugin, and look for style="clear: both;" and delete that in both places you find it. I may have to have to add an option to toggle that on or off… some people need it, but it messes up other layouts.

  67. I installed it and it is working as promissed. I wish you would have mentioned that all previous code added to the comments files needed to be removed.

    I would like the subscribe to comments to appear above the button like you have here. That is how the old one was installed. But it said it had to reside outside the form.

  68. The “subscribe to comments” checkbox has to reside inside the form, and you can place it wherever you like. It is the “Subscribe without commenting” form that has to be outside the comment form (because you can’t nest a form within another form).

Trackbacks

  7. Site News

    Just a note to those of you who comment here regularly: I’m in the process of making a few changes to the comment form. You can read all the nitty-gritty details here, but these are the highlights:

    If you are already subscribed to a post the su…

  16. Following in the footsteps of master matthew, I have enabled two snazy plugins. OCM has been jettisoned in favour of Auto Moderate Comments and I have, after pondering a little, dropped in Mark J’sSubscribe to Comments 2.0 for those who like to keep tabs via email.

  19. Gah. That capcha wasn’t working very well (or at all) so I’ve instituted a different spamchecker, Spam Karma 2 which also involved a patch for a WordPress bug. I also tried to installSubscribe To Comments 2 but it doesn’t play nice with PHP4.12 I guess. As I write this, Dogtato has just been expelled into the backyard by Shane for peeing inside. (I call him Dogtato, Shane’s named him Capone, and his pedegree name is Sonny Bill. Other people have much

  22. After a hard week of studying, I decided to take this morning to upgrade theSubscribe to Comments feature to version 2.0. I have tested it extensively, and it seems to be working fine with a single exception. When deleting a subscription using the Subscription Manager, an error is displayed, but nevertheless the subscription is successfully

  23. my distinguished readers pitch in on the conversation (we favor murmurs of assentiment and wild praises, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., but we also tolerate the occasional big fat hairy troll dissenting individual), but also, thanks to Marc’s awesomeSubscribe to Comment 2.0, you can get replies to your comments emailed to you automatically, which makes it much easier to have meaningful dialogs around here. (And am I the only person who cannot seem to get used to that ‘

  25. Anyone looking for theSubscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin should do so over at Tempus Fugit instead of it’s original home (birthplace?) at Jennifer’s. Mark has taken the original plugin and made a long list of fantastic improvments. I just installed it in the midst of my WordPress 1.5 upgrade and I

  26. Anyone looking for the Subscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin should do so over atTempus Fugit instead of it’s original home (birthplace?) at Jennifer’s. Mark has taken the original plugin and made a long list of fantastic improvments. I just installed it in the midst of my WordPress 1.5 upgrade and I

  27. Anyone looking for theSubscribe to Comments WordPress Plugin should do so over at Tempus Fugit instead of it’s original home (birthplace?) at Jennifer’s. Mark has taken the original plugin and made a long list of fantastic improvments. I just installed it in the midst of my WordPress 1.5 upgrade and I

  28. my distinguished readers pitch in on the conversation (we favor murmurs of assentiment and wild praises, here at Dr Dave Logs Inc., but we also tolerate the occasional big fat hairy troll dissenting individual), but also, thanks to Marc’s awesomeSubscribe to Comment 2.0, you can get replies to your comments emailed to you automatically, which makes it much easier to have meaningful dialogs around here. (And am I the only person who cannot seem to get used to that ‘

  30. : Gets at spam before it can get to you by analysing “incoming requests to your server. If they match a profile of a known spambot, the spammer gets a nice error message instead of your blog.” Outstanding!Subscribe to comments 2.0: Looks like it’s coming along a treat… am having some glitches with installing the ‘subscribe to comments without making one’ option (which I want… very cool option) but am sure we’ll get that flattened out soon.

  31. : Gets at spam before it can get to you by analysing “incoming requests to your server. If they match a profile of a known spambot, the spammer gets a nice error message instead of your blog.” Outstanding!Subscribe to comments 2.0: Looks like it’s coming along a treat… am having some glitches with installing the ‘subscribe to comments without making one’ option (which I want… very cool option) but am sure we’ll get that flattened out soon.