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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Ok installed dev and ran pretty much every scenario I could think of on live test site.
It appears rock solid, no issues found.
– Sort by column
Seems fine, ‘Sent’ column toggles descending /ascending not so sure whether the ‘Accepted’ column shouldn’t be sort by accepted/not yet accepted ?
– Clear screen
works as expected – with minor reservations noted below
– Admin group invite control
Great addition as it adds back control so effectively allowing admin to retain original functionality of group invites, disable completely or extend to complete membership base, tested and appears to work just as expected; tested on subscriber – no invite allowed , promoted user to Mod – allowed from friends list then set mod to allow access to All, Admin allowed access to All etc all works as one would expect and hope.
Minor issues, not bugs.
Having cleared a sent invite from a users list I then dragged up the old invite email and actually accepted the invite, of course as I have removed the invite from my list I am not aware they have accepted – perhaps not a huge issue or an issue at all? What would ideally be nice would be that if invitee did accept we re populated the sent invite list but with Accepted column showing true? Probably tricky to do though , something along the lines of matching is_joined to Is_hidden ideally being able to establish if is_joined was dated later than Is_hidden remove is_hidden and allow to reappear in list. Looking at able I realise this is likely not really possible though especially as you would need to still allow user to clear the entry so a lot of dates would need to be stored joined to the various fields.
In a similar vein as above should someone who opts out update the sent invites list with one further column ‘Declined’ it’s really one of those non issues but as things stand I have no means of knowing the person invited has opted out and they remain on my sent list waiting .
As always excellent work, hope others might test as well, as there may be things I have missed but am continuing to test and will report back anything found.
btw you will need li element margins as the default styling makes use of that horror the ‘reset ‘ knocking out all margins and many other things, your input fields on the widget are stuck together like glue
Thanks as always for the feedback – you guys rule! You found several things I’d missed.
@hnla –
not so sure whether the ‘Accepted’ column shouldn’t be sort by accepted/not yet accepted ?
Bug. Fixed.
What would ideally be nice would be that if invitee did accept we re populated the sent invite list but with Accepted column showing true?
Good thinking. It’s actually not too hard – I just switch is_hidden to 0 when the invitation is accepted. My guess is that most users will be very happy to see that someone has accepted their invitation, even if they have previously cleared it from the list for space reasons.
should someone who opts out update the sent invites list with one further column ‘Declined’
I intentionally didn’t do this, because I figured that people who opt out don’t necessarily want to rub it in the faces of the people who sent the invitations. In the future I will think about a way to make this work without risking hurt feelings
btw you will need li element margins
Quite true. Fixed. I also decided to inherit most of the standard-form styles from bp-default, which I think looks better. Sorry if I sometimes suck at CSS
@techguy –
The wildcard aren’t getting converted in the body of the email
That’s because there are supposed to be two %s before and after to make it a wildcard. You’re not the only person to ask about this, though, so I’ve changed the filter so that either will work fine.
The send invites button is showing on the group page even though the user isn’t a member of that group
Bug. I had spent so much time getting the admin settings for that screen to work right that I forgot about the most basic thing – whether the person was a member of the group! Should be fixed now.
Would be nice to have the option to choose between the invite existing members and invite email.
Essentially, you do have the option. If you don’t want to use the email invitations, limit them to Administrators only. If you don’t want to have invite-anyone-from-the-installation, set each role to Friends Only. I should make better documentation for that.
The widget’s title saves and displays right, but in the Appearance–>Widgets the title field is empty even when you just saved it
Bug. Fixed.
Something doesn’t feel right about the widget.
I agree. I added ’email address’ in the boxes and I think it helps. Let me know what you think.
I’m not sure if widgets can recognize which group your on and automatically check the box for that group.
Great idea. I’ve done it.
Might be worth making mention on the invites page that the email will include an opt out link.
I’m going to add one more feature before tagging the plugin, which will be the ability for admins to add non-editable header/footer information to the invitation email. The inviter will see the header/footer text but won’t be able to edit it. That footer text will include the opt-out link. I think that’ll be explanatory enough.
A link to the settings page for the plugin, next to the deactivate button on the plugins page is always a nice touch too.
I agree. I’d never done it before, but it was actually quite easy! (stole some code from @paulgibbs’s Welcome Pack – with attribution, of course!) I should go back and do this on all my plugins…hmmm….. Anyway, done.
@Erich73 –
The position of the button named “Continue” is slighly hiding the widget-title of the one widget which I have placed underneath
Good catch. It happened because I am bad at CSS and I was using a float where I shouldn’t have been. It’s been fixed.
the text-format within the text-field named “Customize the text of the invitation” is changing its format-style
I know. The way that that message gets populated is through the $_GET variable, which comes through bp_core_redirect and wp_redirect. Frustratingly, wp_redirect strips out url-encoded line breaks. That’s why the paragraphs are getting bunched together. I have a feeling that my best bet for fixing this will be some sort of ugly hack. I’ll see what I can do before tagging the next version.
Is there a chance to style the “Subject Line” and the “Text-field” so that it looks like an e-mail
Good idea. I always thought that it looked a little funny. I decided to style them exactly like the customizable fields, except make the disabled. I think it’s a lot more easily understandable this way.
Is there a chance you re-name the wording for “Sent Invites” to something different
I might change this in the future, but for right now it’s a pain to do it throughout. Maybe you could use a language file to fix it on your installation?
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http://teleogistic.net/donate/ ! Thanks
I intentionally didn’t do this, because I figured that people who opt out don’t necessarily want to rub it in the faces of the people who sent the invitations. In the future I will think about a way to make this work without risking hurt feelings
Yes on consideration I agree, I guess a possible option could be to silently remove the opt outer from the sent invites list but that has possible issues as well, on reflection it’s an issue best left alone.
Something that I was considering having a play with myself over morning coffee was to run a check on whether the send invites page was showing and if so to either disable the widget inputs or simply remove the widget. It’s another of those non issues though.
The Submit input to the left is generally acknowledge as the correct positioning for this type of control from a HCI and accessibility point of view so best not floated to the right. It wouldn’t hurt to wrap your hidden inputs in a paragraph tag as well just in case someone was determined to try and run and validate against a ‘Strict’ Schema.
I agree that the widget lacks something but like yourself and techguy can’t quite see what it is or whether it’s simply a matter of some fluffiness design wise. The addition of ’email address’ ? I have six inputs just for the hell of it and it tends to look a bit odd and repetitive, too many ’email address’, but then again maybe not, it’s now starting to bug me
Just tagged v0.6. Thanks for all your help!
@techguy – I think that the default text had single %s in an earlier release of the plugin, and you may have saved it that way, which means it’s now permanently in your options table. New installations shouldn’t have the same problem.
@everyone – In the next version I might try something like ’email 1′ or something like that. thanks for the tips
@boonebgorges Great plugin, using right now on http://www.chwisgi.com
Now you can set how many max you want to send to. Could it be instead for example three fields and on the last there is a plus (+) button. If the user clicks it adds another field where you can add another mail. Will make it more flexible in my mind. What do you think?
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