Drupal Tutorials and Blog Posts

Auto-Notify Drupal Authors About New Comments

Managing comments on a busy website can get tedious if you need to login and check continually. It's very convenient to get an email with the comment text, so you can see if it's legitimate or comment spam.

To do this in Drupal we're going to use two core modules, Actions and Triggers. We'll also use the Token module to control over the content and recipients for the email

In this tutorial we're going to use Actions, Triggers and Tokens to show you how to automatically send customized emails from Drupal.

Step 1: Install the Token Module

  • You can get the module here: http://drupal.org/project/token
  • Download Token and install from Modules > Add Module.
  • Go to the Modules page and enable the Token module.
  • Also make sure that Trigger module is enabled under the "Core" area of the Modules page.

Step 2. Create an Action

  • Go to Configuration > Actions.
  • Scroll to the bottom to find the selection box.
  • Choose Send e-mail from the selection box at the end of the page.
  • Click Create.
tutuploadsmedia_1337056927712.png

 

Step 3. Fill in the E-mail Recipients

  • Put the cursor in the Recipient box. Leave it there and scroll down the page to see the tokens at the bottom.
tutuploadsmedia_1337057248588.png
  • Click the small gray triangle next to the name Nodes to expand the group.
tutuploadsmedia_1337060828154.png

 

  • Click the triangle to expand Author.
  • Click the blue link across from Email [node author:mail]
  • There are a lot of tokens, and if you've added additional content types and fields you may have an extensive list.
tutuploadsmedia_1337061508710.png
 
 
  • The token will be automatically inserted into the Recipient field.
  • If you are familiar with certain tokens, you can type them in, you don't need to locate them on the list.  You could also type in an email address or more than one separated by a semi-colon if you don't want to use a token at all.
tutuploadsmedia_1337061776704.png

Step 4: Fill in the subject and body

tutuploadsmedia_1337071653499.png

When you are finished creating your message, scroll to the bottom of the screen to click Save.

Here's a sample you can copy to the body. You'll find there are quite a few tokens. If you have custom content types and custom fields and additional plugins, the list may be very long. You should plan out which fields you want to use.


Link: [comment:url]
On: [comment:created:medium]
By: [comment:name] Email: [comment:mail]
[comment:node]

Comment Title: [comment:title]

[comment:body]

Step 5: Create the trigger

tutuploadsmedia_1337064054386.png
  • Go to Structure > Triggers to get access.
tutuploadsmedia_1337064314230.png
  • On the Triggers page go to the Comment Tab..
  • There are several events you can choose from. Each one has a dropdown box.
  • Choose Send e-mail.
  • Click Assign.
  • There is a tab on this page for each module that defines triggers. On this tab you can assign actions to run when triggers from the Comment module happen.
  • You will see your list of assigned actions. In this case we've only defined one action so we only see one.
tutuploadsmedia_1337064612103.png
 

Step 6: Test the Comment Emails

  • Now go to your site, and comment on an article.
  • Here's a copy of the email generated by the action I created:
tutuploadsmedia_1337071020874.png

 

Note: You can get more features from additional modules. For.example,

  • Comment Notify: a lightweight tool to send notification e-mails to visitors about new, published comments on pages where they have commented. Comment notify works for both registered and anonymous users.
  • Watcher: offers your site's users, registered and anonymous visitors, a way to easily watch nodes for changes and new comments without having to post themselves.
  • Notify: allows users to subscribe to periodic emails which include all new or revised content and/or comments much like the daily news letters sent by some websites.
  • Subscriptions: enables users to subscribe to be notified of changes to nodes or taxonomies, such as new comments in specific forums, or additions to some category of blog.
  • Notifications: a complete Subscriptions/Notifications Framework aiming at extendability and scalability. It allows any number of plug-ins defining new event types or subscription types or a different user interface.

Comments

 
Guest
#1 Guest 2012-10-19 11:49

Does it work with disqus module?
 

Add comment


Security code
Refresh

blog-ad

Start Online Training

Members get access to all our video training. That's 1,142 training sessions in Joomla, Drupal, WordPress and Coding.

Manage All Your Joomla Sites

adminicredible

With Admincredible you can update and manage all your Joomla sites. If you have 5 or 500 sites, Admincredible will make your life easier! Visit Admincredible.com.

Latest Comments

The License for Our Tutorials

All of our tutorials are published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license. This means:

  • You can re-use these tutorials.
  • You can modify these tutorials.
  • You must link back to our original tutorial.
  • You can't use these tutorials commercially.

Click here to read the full license.

Open Source Training is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Joomla, WordPress or Drupal projects.
All product names and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Copyright 2013 Open Source Training, LLC. All rights reserved.