CUNY Academic Commons

Thanks for this, Boone. I'm reluctant to ask Laurie to go back to the faculty fellow to help with troubleshooting, as she's already spread pretty thin.

@Laurie, how about setting up a test site using accounts from TLC staff to see if we can recreate some of the problems Soniya was experiencing?

Will do.

I have set up and test site and will try to recreate this issue and report back.

I spent a few minutes looking at how Email Users works. It appears that it only allows emails to be sent to users who have opted into "mass emails". See https://coursetest.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/admin.php?page=mailusers-user-settings. Of the people you emailed to, only Luke has the setting turned on. This is true for both "individual" and "group" emails.

Looking into this, it is becoming clear that this plugin is not appropriate for use on Multisite:
- The "mass email" user setting is networkwide. If it's changed on https://coursetest.commons.gc.cuny.edu/wp-admin/admin.php?page=mailusers-user-settings, it'll be changed for every other site on which the user is a member. There's no finer-grained controls.
- The plugin attempts to set a default "mass email" setting for new users, but the way it's done doesn't mesh cleanly with Multisite at all. It uses the 'profile_update' and 'user_register' hooks, which fire in much different sequence in a multisite environment than in non-MS WordPress.

Based on the above, I'd suggest we look for a better solution for mass-emailing from the WordPress side than Email Users. Indeed, given the above, I'd almost suggest disabling it for anyone who doesn't already have it activated, as it's likely to cause more headache than not. Matt, Luke, Laurie, do you have thoughts about how to proceed?

Hi Boone,

I'm fine with disabling it for anyone who doesn't already have it enabled, and I do think we should look into (or perhaps create) an alternative. This is very much related to OER work so we can draw from those funds if we need to write something new.

Thanks, Matt. I'm going to put a fix in place immediately that disables Email Users on sites where it's not already active. https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/0084fea54a7b0b4848e772160ec3e83af58bda3c

It may turn out in the medium- to long-term that we need to build something custom, especially if we want to avoid the overhead of maintaining two separate email systems in perpetuity. More specifically, it would be ideal if a tool was available for use on the WP Dashboard that shared its internals with the email tools we use on the BP side of the site.

However, in the meantime, I think it's worth looking at a few existing solutions that'd be better than nothing while we work toward an ideal solution for the Commons. Based on some very brief research, here are some possibilities:
- We already have the Newsletters plugin on the Commons, and it seems to work fairly well for sending mass emails. The concept of a Newsletter is a bit different from emailing site users (the concept of "subscription" doesn't quite fit) but it could likely be used without too much trouble.
- https://premium.wpmudev.org/project/mass-email-sender/
- https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/wp-email-users At a very quick glance at the code, it appears that this one should work properly on multisite. No idea whether it has the feature set we are looking for.
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/send-email-from-admin/ looks much more barebones but at least compatible with multisite

Thanks, Boone. Luke and Laurie, can you please look into these alternatives?

Mass Email Sender looks like it's built for whole network emails (may have site specific functions, too, but we don't want the former). WP-Email-Users looks great. Happy to take it for a spin Boone if you want to deploy either to dev or on https://coursetest.commons.gc.cuny.edu/.

Thanks-

It works, but it's not ideal, and seems not to be multisite aware... all emails come from commons@gc.cuny.edu, and there's no site-specific indicator in the emails (though you could create one via a template). I worry about a bunch of responses coming into that account should that be the from address...