notify author when comment is posted

[Rames]

I'd like to send an automatic email notification to the corresponding author when a comment is entered for their article. I realize I'll need to write a new email template, but I don't know how to call the template when a user clicks the send button displayed from comment.tpl. A nice feature would be to include the text of the comment in the email.

Thanks!

rames

[mcrider]

Hi Rames,

To achieve this, you'll have to do some coding within the add() function of pages/comment/CommentHandler.inc.php. It shouldn't be too difficult to setup a mail template, add the comments as a parameter to the template, and send it off to the author. Here's a simple example I grabbed from classes/manager/form/UserManagementForm.inc.php:

Code: Select all

import('mail.MailTemplate');
$mail = &new MailTemplate('USER_REGISTER');
$mail->setFrom($journal->getSetting('contactEmail'), $journal->getSetting('contactName'));
$mail->assignParams(array('username' => $this->getData('username'), 'password' => $password, 'userFullName' => $user->getFullName()));
$mail->addRecipient($user->getEmail(), $user->getFullName());
$mail->send();

You'll have to make your own template in place of USER_REGISTER, create your own parameters (the comments), and change addRecipients to the author. You'll have to do more coding to allow the author to opt out of receiving emails automatically, and to allow users to subscribe to comments. Let us know how it goes!

Please also note that users will be able to subscribe to comments via RSS feeds in version 2.3 of OJS (you can see this and other future features in our roadmap at http://lib-pkp.lib.sfu.ca/wiki/index.php/OJS).

Hope that helps,
Matt

[Rames]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the pointer. I created a new email template 'COMMENT_NOTICE' and added the function 'sendNotice()' to CommentForm.inc.php. I call sendNotice() from the add() function in CommentHandler.inc.php, right after the call to execute(). I added a bit of code to let the author know if the comment is a reply to another comment, and if so pull the title of the parent comment into the email.

This worked fine, with the exception of one quirk. If I added any text to the body of the comment, the email template was overridden by the text of the comment body. I noticed in comment.tpl that the name of the form element for the body of the comment was "body" and was able to fix the issue by giving the from elements more unique names. I updated requests to the form names in CommentForm.inc.php where appropriate.

I borrowed some code from author/form/submit/ArticleEventLog.inc.php and got this event added to the Event log, but am not sure how to add the email to the email log. Any pointers would be appreciated.

As you might imagine, comments are a big part of our journal. My next modification is to allow the reviewers to specify a part of their review for anonymous posting to the article's comments section. I'll take a stab at this myself, but will likely start a new thread if/when I have questions.

Thanks again,
rames

Code: Select all

   
function sendNotice($article,$commentId,$parentId,$parent) {
      import('mail.MailTemplate');
      $mail = &new MailTemplate('COMMENT_NOTICE');
      $authors = &$article->getAuthors();
      $author = &$authors[0];
      $mail->addRecipient($author->getEmail(), $author->getFullName());
      
      $journal = &Request::getJournal();
      if($journal->getSetting('copySubmissionAckSpecified'))
         if (!empty($copyAddress)) $mail->addBcc($journal->getSetting('copySubmissionAckAddress'));
      
      $commentText = "";
      if ($parentId > 0)
         $commentText="This is a reply to '{$parent->getTitle()}'.";
   
      $mail->assignParams(array(
         'articleTitle' => strip_tags($article->getArticleTitle()),
         'authorName' => $author->getFullName(),
         'articleUrl' => Request::url(null, 'article', 'view', $article->getBestArticleId()),
         'commentTitle' => $this->getData('commentTitle'),
         'commentBody' => $this->getData('commentBody'),
         'posterName' => $this->getData('posterName'),
         'posterEmail' => $this->getData('posterEmail'),
         'commentId' => $commentId,
         'parentId' => $parentId,
         'commentText' => $commentText
      ));
      $mail->send();
   }
}

[mcrider]

Hi Rames,

Glad to see you got this working, and thanks for the update--It might be helpful to others down the line. You can find an example of how to log emails in the log() function in classes/mail/ArticleMailTemplate.inc.php.

Cheers,
Matt

[mcrider]

Hi again Rames,

Actually, if you just use an ArticleMailTemplate object instead of a MailTemplate object to setup your template, the logging will be automatic.

Cheers,
Matt

[Rames]

Great, I always like the easy answers. Thanks!

rames