Invite Anyone – invite by email too – please help test
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Hi everyone. I have updated my Invite Anyone plugin to allow invitation by email address. It seems pretty solid, but I would really like to have some other people test it before I make it the stable version.
If you have a non-production site and you wouldn’t mind testing it out, please download the development trunk version at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invite-anyone/download/. If you’re already running a version of Invite Anyone on your site, please make sure to deactivate it before downloading and activating this one. (Note too that you must deactivate and reactivate – if you just replace the files, the necessary db table won’t be created.)
A brief rundown of the new functionality:
– A new subnav item has been added to profile pages, called Send Invites
– Under that item are two pages. The first, Invite New Members, allows you to enter up to five email addresses, a custom message, and select some of the groups you’re a member of.
– The second page is Sent Invites, a list of invitations you’ve already sent.
– When you send the invitation, an email goes to the invitee(s) with the custom message and a link to [your bp install]/register/accept-invitation/[email-address]
– When the user clicks that link, he or she should see the normal register page, with a message above that says “You’ve been invited by [the name(s) of the user(s) who sent invitations]…”
– When the user activates the new account, he or she will receive invitations to all invited groups, as well as friendship requests from all members who sent invitations.
– There is also a new (and ugly!) link on the Group Send Invites page, which takes you to the Send Invites profile page and pre-selects the group you just came from.
– There’s a pretty fair amount of email validation that happens. Try punching in some bad emails (banned on your WPMU install, poorly formed, etc) and see what happens. I should note that right now I’m using WPMU’s native email validation – I haven’t even tried loading it on a single-blog install of WP. I did use if ( function_exists ) so nothing should crash, but it’ll probably allow any old email on single WP.
Phew – I think that’s it.
In the future, things like number of allowed email addresses, the default message, etc will be under the control of the site admin. I’m also going to write some Javascript that does inline validation of form data. But for now I think the key functionality is in place.
Please hammer away at it and leave any bugs/suggestions here.
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hnla – The plugin should work fine on 1.2.2.1. I tested it there briefly myself (though I developed it on BP trunk) and everything seemed to work OK.
Sorry about the email problems
I’m using the exact same code as BP core (wp_mail, to be specific), so if you’re experiencing more general BP mail problems, then it’s probably not this plugin’s fault.
No didn’t think it was the plugins fault, and might roll back to 1.2.2.1 as issues like that make testing to the full outcome rather difficult
feeling reckless – I fancy uploading this to the production site. seems pretty stable and final to me?
This just noted and can probably tackle with a little hacking, but will mention anyway for the record.
Date stamp for sent invites does not look to WP for user preferred formatting instead displaying in the format that drives some of us nuts
month/day/year
In the UK and elsewhere the preferred format for dates is day/month/year as that is clearly the better way
It’s minor point!
Anton and hnla – thank you so so much for your very helpful comments. (I take it that most of the big functionality is working properly, since these are relatively small issues – that’s good news!)
Anton – Great point. I had originally not hardcoded the register link, but then had to hardcode it for some testing purposes and forgot to change it back. The latest trunk version creates the accept_link with site_url( BP_REGISTER_SLUG ), which is the same code used in BP core. Please let me know if it works for you.
hnla – Very sorry about my American date formatting
I have changed it so that the format matches the setting in Dashboard > Settings > General. As for markup in the welcome message: I didn’t manually strip tags because I’m using $wpdb->prepare to write to the database, which means that all tags are escaped and therefore presumably not harmful. But I thought about it, and I think you’re right that it’s a good idea not to allow HTML in that box – it tends not to work well in email. The latest trunk version strips tags before sending the email/saving it to the db.Finally, hnla, I’m guessing that your problem with /register/ redirects may have had something to do with one of the following:
– Anton’s problem (/register/ was hard coded into the accept_link)
– You are clicking on the link while logged in. BP redirects from the register page for logged in users. Log out, or try another browser.
– You’ve disabled registrations. In WPMU, look at Site Admin > Options; in WP I think it’s Settings > General > Anyone can register.
Thanks again for your help. I should be able to put a stable tag on it in the next day or so thanks to your feedback.
Ah yes the reason was that I was logged in, logged out and tried the email link and all correct..
Hmm html is not apparently escaped or at least if it is that doesn’t prevent links being pasted in the form
It’s a minor point though but just think that it’s probably safer to ensure that just text string can be entered although that’s all a link is strictly speaking.
One error stumbled on – very possibly irrelevant as it hasn’t manifested on live test site – is that playing around on local dev site when I tried to send an invite I received an undefined function error which I thought odd and don’t think I noticed yesterday.
by-email.php is calling function invite_anyone_record_invitation() – function lives in db.php and db.php is being required() into by-email.php and correctly as far as I can determine, yet php keeps returning function undefined on invite_anyone_record_invitation() as though it were trying to run the function before it were included or it’s gone out of scope somehow. Checking the table shows no entries but then it wouldn’t if the function isn’t run. this is just fyi in case it suggests anything possibly problematical.
Yes all in all it does feel very stable with most of the issues not really to do with correct functionality (Most have been user error
)but operational refinement.
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