bbPress Digest

bbPress Digest is a WordPress plugin (download) that enables sending of a digests with a list of topics active on a bbPress-powered forum in the last 24 hours or 7 days.

Example of email sent to user with list of active topics

Users are able to choose on their profile edit pages (both built-in and from bbPress) whether or not they want to receive digest, at what time of the day, at which day of the week (if they receive weekly digest), and should digest include topics from all forums or only selected ones.

User settings with subscription deselected
User settings with subscription deselected
User settings with subscription selected, which includes all forums
User settings with subscription selected, which includes all forums
User settings with subscription selected, which includes only forums chosen by user
User settings with subscription selected, which includes only forums chosen by user
User settings with subscription selected, with weekly interval enabled
User settings with subscription selected, with weekly interval enabled
One-click forum subscription

Administrators are able to choose on bbPress Settings page whether or not they want to enable optional weekly digest and one-click subscription.

General settings
General settings

There are hooks that enable developers to further customize this plugin.

It requires that cron runs regularly at least once an hour.

bbPress Digest is a very lightweight, it loads necessary files with functions only when needed.

If you are translator, you can translate it to your language and send translations. Currently, Serbian and Italian translations are available.

bbPress Digest is released under the terms of GNU General Public License. It is completely free so if you find it useful you can give something back to author. Your help could be done by giving donation, translating plugin to your language, sending bugs and suggestions, promoting plugin in blogs, forums social networks, and other websites.

55 thoughts on “bbPress Digest”


  1. Milan,

    Thank you for making this plugin. I can’t believe how little control over email notifications wp/bp/bb gives you out of the box.

    Question: I installed the plugin and it seemed to install fine, but I must be missing something, because I don’t see where I can change any of the settings or preferences for this plugin.

    Thanks for your help.

    Reply


  2. hello. looks cool–i just installed it. i’d prefer to do a weekly digest. is there a param in the php i can change to make this a weekly instead of a daily? thanks!

    Reply


    2. I’d love to have this plugin BuddyPress compatible too. THe other link you provided for BP Group Subscriptions isn’t good for me as I don’t have groups activated.
      This plugin is perfect but it doesn’t show its settings inside the BP profile and I have disabled user access to the back end so users cannot access their settings for your plugin.

      Reply


  5. Hi,
    I have to second Eli’s post- thank you for doing this, I can’t believe bbpress doesn’t have something like this built in!

    A suggestion: I had to edit the plugin to change several text elements. Could it be built in so these text elements can be customized in admin settings – so if there’s an update, my changes won’t get overwritten? I could see this being useful for many people.

    Changed text examples (can provide more if you’d like):

    • title on profile page – from bbPress Digest Emails to Forum Digest Emails (because website users have no idea what bbpress is)
    • text on profile settings – ie: FROM ‘Check if you want to receive daily digest with active forum topics for that day.’ TO ‘Check if you want to receive digest emails about Forum activity, then choose additional settings.’ (because I “cleaned” up text/instructions for my language)
    • Subject and message on email – ie: FROM ‘This topics have been active in the last 24 hours:’ TO ‘USLGA forum activity for the last 24 hours’ and FROM ‘Active topics for’ TO ‘USLGA forum activity for’ (because the email needed more identifiers that it was coming from our organization/website)

    I’d love to be able to change the date format on the email subject (02. October 2012) also, but I don’t know enough yet! 🙂
    Thanks again!

    Reply


    1. Thanks for detailed explanation of your problem. You’re right about title on profile page, I should replace word bbPress.

      I definitely won’t add text labels to settings because that will overcomplicate plugin. However, that doesn’t mean you can’t change those strings without having those changes be overwritten.

      You can change those strings (including date format) by using WordPress filter gettext, ngettext, gettext_with_context and ngettext_with_context. Just put your function in your custom plugin add those replacements will occur even when plugin is updated.

      Here are some examples of usage of this functions:
      http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/gettext
      http://wpsnipp.com/index.php/functions-php/use-gettext-ngetext-to-replace-array-of-words-in-wpadmin/
      http://pippinsplugins.com/introduction-gettext-filter-wordpress/
      http://sumtips.com/2011/08/change-dashboard-menu-items-text.html

      Reply


      1. Thanks for the reply and for the examples. I don’t know that I’ll be able to pull that off, but you’ve given me the resources to try it! 🙂

        Reply


  6. Thank you for your wonderful plugins. I have WordPress 3.2 and your most recent version of bbPress Digest. For the life of me I cannot find where to select the “weekly option”. I can only find the daily option. Thanks in advance.

    Reply


        1. same issue here. can’t find the setting to turn on weekly digests anywhere.

          my configuration:
          WP 3.5
          BP 1.5.6
          bbPress 2.0.3

          Reply


        2. Hi Milan, as posted by Justin on 8 January 2013 the bbpress digest options are not appearing in the bbpress forum settings so there is no way to switch on weekly emails!

          I think this plugin needs updating as since the latest bbpress was released this hasn’t worked!

          Any chance of getting it sorted pretty please??

          Reply


      2. I was so excited to find bbPress Digest but – unfortunately – I have the exact same problem as Justin. My Site Role is Administrator and my Forum Role is Keymaster. The bbPress Digest Settings (show one-click subscription and show weekly digest option) do not appear on my Settings > Forums page. However the daily option appears on My Profile page. Were you ever able to resolve this?

        I’m running WordPress 3.6.1, bbPress 2.4 and bbPress Digest 2.0.

        Thanks for any help you can provide!
        Terry

        Reply


          1. Hi Milan,

            I’ve installed 2.1 and have enabled “Weekly”. I opened my user profile and chose “Weekly” so should know in a week whether it is working. Thanks very much for your efforts!

            A small thing – you might want to update the text in the User Profile because many users might not choose “Yes”, since it only mentions the daily option as follows:

            “Check if you want to receive daily digest with active forum topics for that day.”

            Thanks again,
            Terry

            Reply


  7. Hi,

    Thanks for a great plugin.

    I’m looking to incorporate this into s2Member’s profile edit page. Is there a shortcode to pull the digest info into another page other than what it does automatically already? Or, alternatively, is there any guidance you can give to get me started in the correct direction?

    Reply


    1. Unfortunately, there are no shortcodes at all by this plugin. I’m not sure do you want to display content of digest email, or you want to display form where user can subscribe to. In any case, you can look into the files in inc folder and even use those functions that are provided.

      If you tell me exactly what you want to do, I’m might give you more precise answer.

      Reply


  9. I’ve been looking for something that will send a digest of user-chosen categories that works for regular WordPress posts — can I make this work on a regular WordPress site, that’s not bbPress-powered?

    Reply


  10. Thank you for a great plugin. I have been updating the “events.php” in an attempt to create a more visually appealing digest email. It seems to not like any formatting I add. Is there any way or any guidance you can give me here?

    Thank you very much for your time.

    Reply


  11. Hello There,

    Thanks for the great plugin.

    I am unable to find the option to set “weekly email” or “one click subscription” option after I enabled this plugin.

    Do I need to make any additional config changes for this to be visible and users to subscribe?

    Thanks in advance.

    Reply


  12. Hi Milan,
    Thanks for providing this – essential functionality for bbpress.
    I am however having difficulty as I never get any digests sent unless I manually trigger the wp-cron job using advanced cron manager plugin… I have added an hourly linux cron job to trigger wp-cron just to much sure that digests get sent out when there is no activity on site, but this doesn’t trigger the job either…
    Any ideas?
    I have used your additional functions to change title and from details and made some amendments to add line breaks as the text/html output was displaying as one line, but I also wanted to amend the format from this:
    These topics have been active in the last 24 hours:
    Welcome!: http://.....co.uk/big/forums/topic/welcome/#post-408
    … to this:
    <a href ="http://.....co.uk/big/forums/topic/welcome/#post-408">Welcome!</a>
    … but I can’t see how the message body is constructed (in inc/event.php). Any suggestions?
    What I would really like is for the email to be a true digest of all activity – including the text of all new posts in the message body so there is no need to access the WordPress/BBPress site at all to be kept up-to-date, but I have no idea if this is possible…
    Many Thanks 🙂

    Reply


    1. HI – just a follow up to the last post…
      wp-cron is definitely working as I have several cron jobs including a backwpup daily job that is regularly woring fine. But even when I hit wp-cron manually or run it from a real cron task (using wget or curl) the bbp_digest_event does not fire…
      If and only if I manually trigger it from advanced cron manager plugin, then it runs OK…
      Can’t figure it out… any ideas at all??
      Thanks

      Reply


      1. Sorry for the late reply. I really don’t know what is a problem since if it didn’t work it wouldn’t work for all. You can see with plugin like WP Crontrol if there is actually event for this plugin in cron list.

        Reply


        1. Thanks for your reply…
          What a puzzle… Yeah I can see the wp cron job and manually trigger it with advanced cron manager plugin, but it doesn’t run otherwise. And other wp cron jobs are working… I have no idea how to proceed with this so any ideas would be welcome…

          When/if I get it to work I would also (like Cedric) wan to customise the content – so each topic had an <a href rel="nofollow"> tag around it linking to the topic itself – this seems to me to be the best way of outputting this information, so a reader can quickly navigate to the topic of interest – wouldn’t you agree?
          Perhaps if you have time you could provide a detailed explanation of how this could be done?

          Many thanks for your work…

          Reply


  13. Dear Milan,

    The email digest showed by email look like that when I received it:

    This topics have been active in the last 24 hours: WANTED B727F 100hrs/month – ASIA: http://theaviationhub.net/forums/topic/b727f-100hrsmonth-asia/ WANTED R44 &amp; B206 Helicopter pilot wanted -South Africa: http://theaviationhub.net/forums/topic/r44-b206-helicopter-pilot-wanted-south-africa/ WANTED Jetstream (BAe J31/32) Captains &amp; First Officers required – LinksAir Ltd: http://theaviationhub.net/forums/topic/jetstream-bae-j3132-captains-first-officers-required-linksair-ltd/

    => Is it possible to get a better structure of the digest ? like:

    This topics have been active in the last 24 hours: 

WANTED B727F 100hrs/month – ASIA: 
http://theaviationhub.net/forums/topic/b727f-100hrsmonth-asia/ 

WANTED R44 &amp; B206 Helicopter pilot wanted -South Africa: 
http://theaviationhub.net/forums/topic/r44-b206-helicopter-pilot-wanted-south-africa/ 

WANTED Jetstream (BAe J31/32) Captains &amp; First Officers required – LinksAir Ltd: http://theaviationhub.net/forums/topic/jetstream-bae-j3132-captains-first-officers-required-linksair-ltd/

    Reply


    1. Yes, by default it should go like:

      
Topic Title
Topic Link
Topic Tilte
Topic Link
...

      There can be many customization though they won’t be there by default.

      Reply


      1. thanks for the reply.

        Where I can do customization ?
        Go to Plugin => edit bbpress digest => … then which file I need to edit ?

        Reply


        1. These things are placed in /inc/event.php.

          However, I strongly advice against editing that file because it can be overwritten with any future update and your changes will be lost. Instead, you can use a few hooks in your custom code wherever you put it since I gave enough code options for this to be possible.

          Reply


          2. Milan,

            Can you work on our Bbpress digest ? we’ll pay for that.
            => better presentation
            => fix the SPAM problem (email goes to SPAM)

            Reply


            1. 1) Yes, I can on that terms, please have a look at this page.

              2) This is a problem that is not related to bbPress Digest, for some reason your email address or messages are marked as spam automatically or by receivers. The only way I can do that is by helping you set up in using different email address than you already use.

              Reply


              1. great, How I contact you ?

                SPAM: there is a bbpress notify no spam, which is working; doesn’t go in SPAM.
                I try it in different email system/adress, same, it goes to SPAM.

                Reply


  14. I would like to move my site to PHP 7 however there is apparently one line (line 8?) in bbPress Digest which uses obsolete PHP4 style constructors.

    Any chance you can make a quick fix for this?

    Reply


      1. The PHP Compatibility Checker Plugin says:

        FILE: /homepages/30/d556882726/htdocs/wp/live/wp-content/plugins/bbpress-digest/inc/forums-list.php
        —————————————————————————————————
        FOUND 1 ERROR AFFECTING 1 LINE
        —————————————————————————————————
        49 | ERROR | Deprecated PHP4 style constructor are not supported since PHP7
        —————————————————————————————————

        Reply


  15. This plugin is to me essential! It used to run smoothly on our previous website.. Yet, after moving to a multisite install, it won’t send any digest mail anymore. Any idea why?
    An update would be great!

    Reply


      1. Hello Milan
        Thanks for your reply; actually the problem got solved using WP SES for sending mail.
        I have two more questions:
        1) is there a way to directly test the capability of your plugin to send mail. So far, I need to wait every hour to make one new test and creating a ‘fake’ new forum post. Not very effective 🙂
        2) Is there a way to set some bbpress digest options by default for all existing users, or for all users with a particular role? (leaving them the choice to untick the options afterwards). I could manually check this options on all user profiles, but I’ve got hundreds of users..
        Thanks! I don’t know how come your plugin is not more installed and used; maybe giving it an update, just to relax people on its functionality?
        Thanks for your answers!

        Reply


  16. Hey Milan,
    It would greatly help self-debuging, if you’d be enough kind to suggest me a way to ‘manually’ set mail sending period; I’m trying to dig into inc/event.php.. without obvious success 🙁
    Shall I set $period? In which format?
    Thanks!

    Reply

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