Postmaster, preventing further emails after the initial status change

Question

Just purchased Postmaster, and its working great. Kind of wish I had got it ages ago and saved myself loads of manual emails!

My users submit entries via a safecracker form, that come to me with a status of "pending". I have set up two parcels. The first one sends the user a notification that I have received their entry. This is easily achieved by using the "New" entry trigger & "Pending" status trigger. Works fine.

I then review the entry, make any edits where needed, set the status to "open" and publish the entry.

My next parcel send the entry author an email to tell them the entry is now live on the site. I have set this up via the "edit" entry trigger, and the "open" status.

This works very well. However, if I was to go in and edit that entry again, say simply for a typo, when I save it, it will fire of the original email again.

i do not want this, I only want the original first email to go out, so I am wondering what would be the best way to achieve this?

The only ways I can think, are to have a custom field that maybe identifies that the entry has been edited, and use that in the extra conditionals, or to set up another status of "edited" and ensure that if I make an edit, I change the status to edited.

Can anyone think of an easier way? Ideally I would like it to be as automated as possible!

Answer 1

Here's how we handled this exact situation.

Create a "Send Email" Select Dropdown field with the options "Yes", "No" and within the Field Instructions add the following jQuery.

<script>
$(function() {
    $("#field_id_14").val('No');
});
</script>

Note: You will need to change field_id_14 to whatever your field's id attribute is. You can get this by saving the field, loading the publish entry screen and using Safari/Firefox "Inspect Element" debugging tools.

What this will do is reset the drop down menu to "No" every time the Publish/Edit entry page loads, thus defaulting to not sending an email.

Then within your Parcel Extra Conditionals, add the following condition:

{if parcel:advisory_send_email == "No"}FALSE{/if}

As a result, when you edit/add a new entry. You will have the option to not send, or to send a Parcel that will automatically default to not send/"No". Change the jQuery/conditional logic if you want it to always default to send/"Yes".

Answer 2

Thanks for purchasing Postmaster, and glad you like it.

Couple of questions to ask yourself:

• What trigger do you want to use?
• Perhaps we can use the logged_in_group_id variable in some fashion in the extra conditionals?

So one way would be to use the logged_in_group_id variable and say if Admins or member group X edit the post, the email will not get send. So in theory, it could look like this in the extra conditional fields:

{if parcel:logged_in_group_id == 1}FALSE{/if}

I just tested this and it doesn't work currently, but out of sheer curiosity I modified the code and added it real quick to the parcel and hook parsing routines. So if you think this method would work for you, just let me know. If not, I have a nice place to add more variables should you need them.

Email support[at]objectivehtml.com if you want the latest code. I won't have a chance to release for several more weeks.