Topic: Invite Anyone – invite by email too – please help test

Invite Anyone – invite by email too – please help test

@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

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.

Viewing 25 replies - 26 through 50 (of 174 total)

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@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

hnla – Let me make sure I’m understanding correctly. When you paste a link into the message box, it shows up in the email that gets sent out? Or is it merely that you’re able to type a link into the box?

Very peculiar about the error – I haven’t gotten it on any test installation. If you copy the require( ‘db.php’ ) statement from the top of by-email.php and paste it right above the call to invite_anyone_record_invitation (around line 490ish) does the error go away? Or perhaps there’s a problem with the relative path to db.php – could you try hardcoding the path, just to see if that makes a difference?

Thanks as always.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Sorry should have been clearer it was simply writing a link to the box rather than markup i.e http://example.com which will render as a clickable link.

Markup is escaped, but stripping out would be better as this is received otherwise

<a href="http://google.com">google god of the ether</a> insert escape slashes before double quotes

I’ll have a play around with the require statement positioning

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Hmm moving require position makes no difference, hard coded path neither nor using include()?

I’s must be a be a path or scope issue though as I copied the function from db.php and pasted directly above the call to the function in by-email.php and that works but when the invites sent page renders I have a new call to undefined for the next function that needs to be called.

I don’t think this is worth you spending anytime over as it’s not happening on my live test server or your servers, I will keep a mental note of the issue, it’s correctable with a little more time spent tracking down the issue but is it worth it?

@antonrsaopencirclecoza

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

When logged out and viewing a member’s profile, the “send invites” option is visible on their profile. Shouldn’t it only be for logged in users and users can only send invites from their own profile?

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Good spot!

Checked quickly that emails couldn’t be sent from a users profile by an anonymous user and that appears ok nothing received although it looked as though the process completed, checked the DB and no records entered so guessing that essential functions are wrapped in a is_loogged_in.

Think it’s probably important to ensure only admin and logged in user can see or send from that users profile, wouldn’t really want a general logged in user to be able to use invite-anyone from another members profile.

Edit/ tested: user can only send an actual invite from their own account/profile. attempted to send from another users profile and nothing sent no record added so that’s fine.

It would be nice if the only users that could see the invite-anyone screens in a profile was admin and the actual owner of that profile.

@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

Good call, Anton. I’m going to overhaul the visibility rules before tagging it stable. Obviously the Send Invites tab should only be available to logged in users of their own profile, as you say. I will also make it possible for site admins to limit a bit further who should see the link – by blog role, maybe by time since joined.

@antonrsaopencirclecoza

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Excellent! Can’t wait for the stable release.

@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

OK, I tagged it – hope it really is stable Thanks for the help, gang!!

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Excellent; downloaded stable and overwrote local dev and test live, all appears fine , those issues I had locally with file paths were I think due to me probably updating only selected files? either way cleared up with the new set.

Good backend admin settings, I like being able to set a period of membership before emails can be sent .

Thanks a whole bunch for the work.

I’ll upload to production site tommorow!

Edit/ One minor thing spotted, not sure of the importance really. Logged in as admin I go to another members account/profile click the link ‘send invites’ and as well as being able to see the email screen (not an issue?!) the email message states my admin username – perhaps it would have to, in fact it would have to, unless the screen was removed only being visible if logged in user == user profile

@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

Excellent – and very glad to hear about the period-of-membership thing. If you have more ideas about how to allow admins to restrict visibility, let me know. I think it’s especially important for a plugin like this, which could quickly devolve into spammishness if left unchecked.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Wondering if setting a quota? monthly? to the number that may be sent – not sure if there is any point to that but also mainly concerned with spammerish type issues arising and of trying to second guess non technical minded users managing to something very silly – not unkown

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Hmm does look as though I can log in as a general member navigate to another members profile and see my user name in message and seemingly send an email from their profile with the event recorded in their profile, but I’ll check that further on the live test site.

On local dev site although it recorded the sent email details on the sent invites screen when I log out and back in as the actual user of that account there was no record of any sent invites – as there shouldn’t be for that user.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

On Live test site:

I’m logged in as hnla navigate to:

/members/ethelred/invite-anyone/

Successfully send email from this screen

The sent invites listing is actually my! sent invites listing NOT ethelreds however url is as above ethelred/invite-anyone/sent-invites/send/

Don’t like the fact that one can send from another users account settings/screens?

@antonrsaopencirclecoza

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

I’ve posted some replies on the plugin on another thread: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/invite-friends-from-profile

I’ll keep it here instead.

First test on single WP gives this error: Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_email_address_unsafe()…

@hnla – I’ve noticed this as well and sent an invite from another member’s profile but the email is sent from the member that is logged in. It just looks confusing as you can see the other member’s profile with the invites that you have sent.

@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

I’m fixing both things right now. Sorry for sucking!

@crashutah

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Boone,

I know this wasn’t part of the initial release, but the harvester element would be a great feature. A really simple way to get this going could be to use Plaxo’s widget: http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget It basically pulls the emails from your address book and puts them in a text area. Would be pretty simple to integrate I think.

Thanks for the good work. I’ll be using this and will likely build on top of it.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Sorry for sucking!

Well I wasn’t going to say anything but … :-;

@pedromiguel

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Congratulations,

The plugin is now very usefull

I have a sugestion:

It’s possible to add a “I dont want to receive more invites” on each email? (like a unsubscribe link). This will solve a lot of headaches if someone start receive multiple invites from a lot of people.

@crashutah

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

“It’s possible to add a “I dont want to receive more invites” on each email? (like a unsubscribe link). This will solve a lot of headaches if someone start receive multiple invites from a lot of people.”

Actually something like this might be required by the Can Spam act. Not for sure of the details. I think we need to look at one of the Facebook emails and see what they have since certainly they’ve gone through a lot more work and effort to figure out how to send emails like this in large quantities.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Not exactly sending emails in large quantities though, and as for Can Spam Act I would expect these to be emails being sent by members from their own contacts not a some random list they may have found, I might be inclined to point this out in writing to members though.

The functionality of this really needs to be kept simple and straightforward, with not too many bells and whistles – that can tend to confuse and overwhelm users.

@pedromiguel

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

In some countries you need to have a unsubscribe link, please consider Internet its not only USA.

We really have people using buddypress all arround the world.

And even in countries who is not forced by law, some of us like to have a good user experience and dont have some Sun of the B#$&#$& (read other bad webmasters or bad people) reporting you because you dont have a unsubscribe link, especialy when the email is send from your domain (wp default).

Please note I’m talking just in one feature, not talking on avanced send emailing who’s requires MTA configuration to respect isp limits, and so one… just a simple unsubcribe link

@boonebgorges

Keymaster

14 years, 8 months ago

An opt out link is a good idea but it will take a little time for me to implement it.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

I take your points Pedro and am part of the non USA portion of this interconnected world, however what would they be unsubscribing from? don’t give the impression that they can rescind their membership as we have delete accounts deactivated, and the sent email is not or shouldn’t be a recurring mailout or part of a list these would be members own contact.; but all that aside it doesn’t hurt to cover bases.

@hnla

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

Wondering whether a disclaimer entered via tha admin config screen covers things explaining that the email is sent by a member of the community along with a link to report abuse to the site admin.

@crashutah

Participant

14 years, 8 months ago

hnla,

Whether legal or not, the feature would be a better user experience. Plus, I don’t know for sure, but I’m guessing that an “opt-out” link that removes your name from future emails would help to avoid getting your server blacklisted or filtered by the various spam filters as well. I’ll add it to my list to try and research some of the details for Boone so he can implement it the best way possible.