wp-SwimTeam v1.4.0-beta-3 available

This morning I resolved my Subversion problems with phpHtmlLib and have posted v1.40 beta 3 of wp-SwimTeam.  This release cleans up the Roster Export functionality which had become cumbersome as more formats were added.  Instead of multiple choices from the dropdown menu, there is a single choice (Export Roster) which brings up a new form which allows the user some control over how much of the roster is exported and in what format(s).

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This release is dependent on an update to phpHtmlLib so make sure you update it before loading this beta version.  You must be running phpHtmlLib v2.6.7 or later for this new Export Roster functionality to work correctly.

wp-SwimTeam Beta (2186 downloads ) Email Users Beta (4827 downloads )

Roster Export Improvements – Coming Soon!

Here is a tease of some improvements I am making to the Roster Export functionality.

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Currently when the roster is exported there is no control over which swimmers are included.  All active swimmers are always included.  Similarly, each format must be exported separately.

This new functionality will allow the ability to export gender specific rosters and/or multiple formats at the same time.

The next release of wp-SwimTeam will also require an update to phpHtmlLib which I had to make in order to properly implement this functionality.

Stay tuned!

Email Users v4.5.3-beta-4 now available

This morning I pushed out beta-4 for Email Users v.4.5.3.  This latest update addresses the duplicate header information discovered by Andy Fragen.  I had already fixed the problem with the TO header Andy noted but was unaware of the duplicate MIME-Version header.  It turns out, there was also a duplicate X-Mailer header as well.

By default wp_mail() sits on top of PHPMailer.  WordPress does not check for either the MIME-Version header nor the X-Mailer header.  Unless specifically set, PHPMailer will add its default values for these two headers which is what was happening.  It appears that some systems are sensitive to duplicate headers and reject the messages and others do not.  This definitely explains why it is difficult to reproduce reports that come in of users not receiving email.

Because wp_mail() is pluggable, other mail implementations may be expecting these headers to continue to exist.  What I have done is added two new options to add the headers as Email Users has been doing all along.  By default these two options are off because PHPMailer duplicates them and I expect most people use the default WordPress implementation.

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I also improved the information panel I added recently to report the existance of any filters which may interact with Email Users.  For the most part these filters don’t do any harm however they can change override the FROM information in the email or the format which may be unexpected. The new information in the panel is nothing more than a note that something else may be affecting your email outside of Email Users (e.g. why is my From name different than what I set?).

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Please report any issues with this latest beta update.

Email Users Beta (4827 downloads )

Email Users v4.5.3-beta-3 now available

This afternoon I posted the third beta release of Email Users v4.5.3.  There is a pretty significant change in this build so I may bump to v4.6 when I release it.

Yesterday I posted an article about an odd Email Users problem I was looking at.  This build fixes (correctly) the problem encountered by that user by properly using get_users() instead of a complex SQL query to retrieve the information used to construct the User Settings page.

In addition to being properly constructed, the User Settings page has a number of fixes including proper sorting and the addition of Search (which I could never get working using the old query).

I’ve also addressed a couple of other very minor requests that came up recently in the WordPress Support Forum.

Email Users Beta (4827 downloads )

A Really Odd Email Users Problem

I was recently contacted about an Email Users issue on a site that is using bbPress and S2Member.  The person had come to the conclusion that there was some sort of conflict between the three plugins which resulted in the Email Users -> Users Settings screen being empty and asked me to look into it.

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Clearly something is amiss as in order to access the WordPress Dashboard you need to login and in order to login, there needs to be at least one user!  This isn’t the sort of situation I can easily replicate.  Fortunately the person with this problem provided me access to their server so we could do some debugging.

The functionality in Email Users is based on the WP_List_Table class and an example plugin which you can find in the WordPress Plugin Repository.  When I first implemented it I was retrieving the list of users with a call to get_users() however I never got the sorting working correctly.  After playing around with it for a while, I gave up and wrote my own query.  The query I wrote yielded the results and sorting I wanted so I didn’t think much about it.  Until today.

This the query that WordPress generates and sends to MySQL:


SELECT ID, display_name, user_email, user_login, m1.meta_value first_name, m2.meta_value last_name, m3.meta_value massemail, m4.meta_value notifications
FROM wp_users u
LEFT JOIN wp_usermeta m1 ON (m1.user_id = u.ID AND m1.meta_key = 'first_name')
LEFT JOIN wp_usermeta m2 ON (m2.user_id = u.ID AND m2.meta_key = 'last_name')
LEFT JOIN wp_usermeta m3 ON (m3.user_id = u.ID AND m3.meta_key = 'email_users_accept_mass_emails')
LEFT JOIN wp_usermeta m4 ON (m4.user_id = u.ID AND m4.meta_key = 'email_users_accept_notifications')
ORDER BY last_name ASC LIMIT 0,100

What this query does is select all of the WordPress User Ids, first names, and last names, which have the proper Email Users user meta keys. The data is returned and stored in a format which can be rendered in the List Table.

Because the table was empty, I wanted to see what the results of the query were as that would tell me where the issue might be.  Because I had access to the MySQL database via phpMyAdmin, I was able to run the query directly against MySQL.  When I did so, this is what I found:

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This certainly was unexpected but it explained why the List Table was empty.  I have never run into this sort of problem, in fact, I had never heard of either the SQL_MAX_JOIN_SIZE or the SQL_BIG_SELECTS MySQL system variables.

I was able to alter SQL_BIG_SELECTS using the following SQL:


SET SQL_BIG_SELECTS=1

When I did this and re-ran the query, phpMyAdmin returned the results I would have expected to see.  This was good news – it appears this users problem is due to a MySQL setting.  The bad news is sometimes it is hard to change these settings and it isn’t something I thought I could add to the query itself.

As a test, I modified the source for one of Email Users files so it was calling the original method I had coded  based on get_users() to see if it would work and it did.  This is very good news as I suspect fixing the sorting issue (or living with it) will be easier than changing the MySQL system variable settings.

My next step is to see if I can fix the sorting problem and roll out an update.

Email Users v4.5.3-beta-1 now available

I’ve been looking at a problem reported on the WordPress Support Forum.  While I can’t replicate the problem, I have found some things in the code which constructs the email headers which needed some attention.

This beta build has refactored the construction of the email headers as well as a couple recently requested minor enhancements (%POST_CONTENT% keyword, CC Sender).

Email Users Beta (4827 downloads )

Google Forms v0.58-beta-1 available

This afternoon I posted a beta release of v0.58 to address a problem reported in the WordPress Support Forum.  The problem arises when the answer for a checkbox or radio button contains the apostrophe character.  This releases fixes the problem but needs testing.  I did some testing using the form which was having UTF-8 issues and all seems ok.

Google Forms Beta (7727 downloads )

Email-Users Debugging – why don’t my users receive email?

Periodically users post questions in the Email-Users support forum wondering why their users don’t receive email messages when they expect them to.  There are many reasons why users don’t receive email, some are within the control of Email-Users but many are not.

Email-Users User Settings

Email-Users is based on two user settings (which appear on the user’s profile page):

  1. Receive post or page notification emails
  2. Receive emails sent to multiple recipients

EU_SS_14Email-Users has a plugin level setting which allows end users to modify their own settings which is enabled by default.  When it is disabled, only users with the proper permissions can modify user settings related to Email-Users.  No matter how the user has their settings configured, a user can always receive an email when they are the only recipient.

EU_SS_15In Email-Users v4.5.2 a new Dashboard Widget has been added which reports the number of users who have their settings configured to receive each type of email.  This information also appears on the Plugin Settings Page and should either of the types of email not have any users set to receive email, a warning message is displayed at the top of the screen.

EU_SS_17Changing the Email-Users settings for a large number of users can be accomplished from the User Setting menu.  By selecting the desired Users, Notifications and Mass Email can be enabled or disabled for a large number of users at one time.  For a site that has a large number of users, the number of users which appear on each page can be changed on the Settings Page.

Test Email

Before sending out notifications or messages, it is important to validate the underlying WordPress email system is working.  On the Plugin Settings page there is the ability to send a Test Message.

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Email-Users utilizes WordPress’ wp_mail() function to send email.  It does not interact with the OS or PHP mail functions directly.  By using wp_mail(), which can be overridden by other WordPress plugins, Email-Users can work with different server configurations and email infrastructure.

If you don’t receive the test message then you may have a problem with your underlying WordPress email system.  Do you receive email for user registration and comments?  If not, there is something wrong which is out of the scope of Email-Users.

On some servers plugins such as WP-Mail-SMTP (this is just an example, there are others) can be used in situations where email is being sent but isn’t being received.

There is no point in trying to send Notifications or Mass Emails if the Test Message isn’t working.

BCC Limits

Some servers limit the number of email addresses which can appear in the BCC header of an email message.  Email-Users has a setting to control the number of addresses which appear in the BCC field.  If Email-Users is working for a small number of users but isn’t working for a larger number (e.g. all of your users) , you may be dealing with a BCC limit.

If you are able to send email to 3-5 users by selecting them from the list of users, I would next try sending a message to about 10 users and see if that works.

The sending logic is only different when 1 user is selected. Anytime more than one user is selected (2, 10, 37, 67, 1000, etc.), the same logic path through the code is used.

The only thing that is different is how many emails are sent and that is based on the BCC limit setting. If there is no limit, which is the default, it sends one email with all recipients on the BCC line. For any other setting, it will send some number of emails, depending on the BCC limit. If the BCC limit was set to 30 and you had 67 recipients, it would send 3 emails: The first 30, the second 30, and the final 7.

Advanced Debugging

In some situations you may want to examine what Email-Users is doing in gory detail.  For development purposes Email-Users has a DEBUG mode.  When in debug mode Email-Users will log quite a bit of information to the PHP error console using error_log() including the actual email headers it generates.  It can be very useful to see the actual mail headers to ensure the expected recipients are actually included.

Because gaining access to the contents of the error_log() differs from web host to web host, I recommend using a WordPress debugging capability to capture it in the site’s /wp-content folder.  By setting WP_DEBUG_LOG to true in your wp-config.php file, you can easily access the resulting debug.log file.  On my development machine I use the following set up in my wp-config.php file:

define('WP_DEBUG', true); // or false
if (WP_DEBUG) {
 define('WP_DEBUG_LOG', true);
 ini_set('display_errors', 'on');
 error_reporting(E_STRICT | E_ALL);
 define('SAVEQUERIES', true);
 define('SCRIPT_DEBUG', true);
 error_log('Debug On!') ;
}

You would not want this on a production server but to temporarily chase down a problem, it works well.  Unfortunately some plugins issue a lot of notices or warnings so you can run into the “Headers already sent” problem so you may want to tweak the above settings to meet your needs.

Once your WordPress debugging settings are tuned to your liking, you need to enable Debug for Email-Users.  Doing this requires manually editing one of the plugin files.

On or about line 46 of the email-users.php file you will find a line of code which reads:

define( ‘MAILUSERS_DEBUG’, false);

You need to change the code such that it reads:

define( ‘MAILUSERS_DEBUG’, true);

After you have made this change Email-Users will output information to the error_log.

In the image below you can see a series of email headers each with 10 email addresses in the BCC field (BCC limit is set to 10).

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If the information in the error_log is what is expected then there is little, if anything which can be done from Email-Users.  At this point you will need to figure out where the email is routing to and where it isn’t which is beyond the scope of the Email-Users plugin.

Anecdote

I was using Email-Users on our local Swim Team’s web site and heard from a number of parents that they weren’t receiving emails.  I noticed that all of the reports were coming from families with RoadRunner email addresses.  It turned out that Time Warner had blacklisted our Swim Team’s domain.  By filling out a form with TWC and verifying some information, we were able to get white listed but for several weeks I wasn’t sure how to resolve it.

Email-Users 4.5.2 released

This morning (updated) afternoon I released a minor update, v4.5.2 (updated) v4.5.3, of Email-Users.  This update adds new information on the Dashboard to help the WordPress Admin ensure that the number of users they expect to receive email is correct.

There is a new Dashboard Widget and an updated Settings Page which note how many users will receive each type of email.  If no users will receive notifications or mass emails, a warning message will be displayed at the top of the Settings Page.