SOLUTION: Automatic email once post has been approved

Being able to send a confirmation email to a non-WP registered (anonymous/guest) submitter, when their post has been approved, seems to be a very much requested feature by lots of users (including myself!).

I can appreciate why it can't be done yet in Gravity Forms (although it should be in a future release), however I believe the code below would be a suitable, simple solution.

The following assumes that you're already collecting an email address on the form, that its a required field and that the email address is being stored in a unique custom field.

So simply add this code into your theme's functions.php file, replacing YOUR_CUSTOMFIELD_KEY with the name of the custom field that you're using to collect the email address.

function email_members($post_ID)  {
	global $post;
	$email_to = get_post_meta($post->ID, 'YOUR_CUSTOMFIELD_KEY', true);
	$headers = 'From: Name <name@name.com>' . \\"\r\n\\";
        $subject = "Your subject here";
	$message = "Your message here";
    wp_mail($email_to, $subject, $message, $headers);
    return $post_ID;
}

add_action('publish_post', 'email_members');

You can even do fancy things like displaying the permalink in the body of the message. Add this at the top of that code:

$permalink = get_permalink( $post->ID );

and then simply add $permalink into the $message variable e.g.

$message = "Your message here " . $permalink . ". And then more text here!";

It seems to be working for me and so in the spirit of open-source I just thought I'd share this with everyone else too!

Duncan

Hmmm, nice suggestion - certainly I could see instances of when that scenario could happen.

Also to note, this code assumes that the form has also explicity stated that a submitters email address will be used to contact them - clearly there's no opt-out mechanism, so wouldn't want to fall foul of any legal obligations about reusing personal information.

Might this code (or a derivative of), be easily included in a future release of GF? With a nice little backend interface to be able to control the messages etc? :-)

D

Hi Patag,

Assuming you are implementing this for posts created from a Gravity Form, you'll wanted to add a Post Custom Field from the Post Fields section on your form. Using the Post Custom Field you can store any user submitted value (or a number of system generated values) as a custom field of the post generated by the Gravity Form submission.

No problem. In Rnfsolutions original snippet, he is getting the user's email from a custom field. So what you'll need to do is add a "Custom Field" from the "Post Fields" field menu ( http://grab.by/9Vyb ) to your form. Then you'll update the "Custom Field Name" attribute of the Custom Field field (haha, hope that makes sense) to whatever you'd like to name your custom field ( http://grab.by/9Vyh ).

Now back to Rnfsolutions snippet, you'd replace "YOUR_CUSTOMFIELD_KEY" in the code to the name of your custom field (in my example above, I named the custom field "user_email").

Make sense? :)

Has this been integrated into the plugin?
I would like to do exactly this but since quite a while has passed since this post I am not sure if this function has been integrated or if I should try and follow these instructions?

Hi, great idea to do that this way. I'm using a custom post type for my form submissions and this way I'm able to test the field before I send the email message to that email address from my custom field.

But there is a problem: I get the email address into my custom field and I used the same key name for the email function, but there is no email send after the post is gets published.
Any idea what might be wrong?

EDIT:
I found the problem, because I'm using a custom post type (named "questions") I need to change the action:

add_action('publish_questions', 'email_members');

Great function even for non GF tasks :)