Post Status Notifier

Notify every WordPress post change!

You want to be notified when one of your contributors submitted a new post for revision or an editor published one? Vice versa you want to notify your contributors when their posts got published?
This is just the beginning of what you can achieve with Post Status Notifier (PSN)!

It works with all kind of custom post types, supports all custom taxonomies like categories and tags of other plugins. You can grab all these taxonomy values and custom fields attached to a post and use them as placeholders in your custom notification texts. PSN has a powerful conditional template syntax featuring many filters and functions to get the most out of the placeholders!

Define as many notification rules as you need with all kind of settings, like custom CC, BCC and FROM emails addresses or multiple attachments.
PSN is extensible! Build your custom module to implement a new notification service.

PSN works great with plugins like WP Job Manager (read the blog post), Calendarize.it (read the blog post), Crowdfunding by Astoundify (read the blog post), WP User Frontend (read the blog post) or Advanced Custom Fields, just to name a few. The possibilities are endless. Want to automate your publishing workflow with Buffer? No problem!

And if you are looking for a solution to create custom email notifications for user submitted posts, PSN works great together with Frontend Publishing Pro, also available on CodeCanyon.

Features

Support for email attachments (Learn more)

New status “Not scheduled”
New rule condition: Post ID whitelist / blacklist, see documentation page.
New rule condition: Exclude recipients by user ID or email address
Custom rule match condition based on template syntax, see: Dynamic match condition

Content Diffs, see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/content_diffs.html

Rule trigger limitations, see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/limitations.html
Dynamic recipients, see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/dynamic_recipients.html
Late execution, see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/options.html#late-execution
Mandrill support, see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/options.html#advanced
Redesigned options page for better overview

New in version 1.7: Mail Queue
Handle large amounts of generated notification emails by sending them deferred
Customize max amount, mail queue execution recurrence and max tries on errors
Optionally log successfully sent emails in the mail queue log
Uses WordPress’s internal Cron API to trigger mail queue execution

Define custom notification rules
Categories filter: Include or exclude categories (even from custom post types) from notifications
Create custom email texts with support for many placeholders
Supports user roles (custom roles too) as email recipients
Import / export of your notification rules
Custom sender e-mail. Define the notification sender (FROM) per rule or as a default in the options.

Support for HTML mails
Create email templates for reusability

Support for posts, pages and all custom post types
Support for all post status values

You can choose from a variety of placeholders to perfectly adapt the email texts to your needs
Dynamic placeholders: You will be able to fetch every custom field or taxonomy attached to your posts
Placeholder filters: Completely adjust the content of placeholders to your needs (supports the filters of the famous PHP template engine Twig)

Use PSN’s powerful conditional template syntax to dynamically create your notification texts
Many filters to change the placeholder contents
Conditions (if, elseif, else) and Loops
Use special functions to access any kind of data e.g. wp.get_userdata( [post_author] )

Store your recipients email addresses in custom lists. No need to create WordPress user accounts for each recipient.

Supports SMTP. You find all necessary SMTP settings to connect your SMTP server in the options section.
WordPress multisite compatible
Optional logging: Logs status changes based on your rules
Dashboard widget showing the latest log entries
Comprehensive documentation
Included translations: english, german
Support in english and german via Zendesk: ifeelwebde.zendesk.com
Tested on Windows, Mac OS and Linux
Built on our ifeelweb.de WordPress Plugin Framework

PSN is ready to be extended by custom modules (see the manual)
Implement support for your own notification / messaging service
Add custom placeholders to perfectly adjust PSN to your plugin or theme
Endless possibilities…
Please contact me if you have questions about extending PSN
What customers say

“Great plugin, look through maybe 7 plugins until found this one and it is the best.”
- misolek

“just got the pro version and it?s working great, awesome plugin man and thanks for your excellent support”
- nomadone

“This plugin is very intuitive and works great. Very helpful support. Top notch!”
- Rick

“Thank you for your great support ? the plugin works great now and has accomplished what 5 other commercial and free plugins couldn?t ? to provide simple and configurable email notifications for WP status changes.”
- Jon

Use cases

Here are some simple examples of how you can use Post Status Notifier. You can easily adapt the notification rules to your own use case.

You host a blog / website with several authors and you want to be informed when a new post is ready for review? This rule sends a notification email to the blog admin when a new post got submitted for review.

This rule sends an email to the author of a post when it got published.

This rule is for blog admins who want to be informed about every single post status change.

If you are using Buffer for automatically sharing your WordPress posts with your social profiles, PSN can do the job for you. See how it works in this blog post.

Requirements
WordPress >= 3.3
PHP >= 7.4
Changelog
Version 1.12.0 – 2025/02/23
Added: Two new options to handle shortcodes in text email notification body and subject
Fixed: Custom bulk actions in log list table did not submit if nothing was selected
Version 1.11.7 – 2024/10/24
Fixed: XSS security issue
Version 1.11.6 – 2024/08/14
Fixed: Link to rule edit page on dashboard rule list
Fixed: PHP code improvements to avoid incompatibilities with future versions
Version 1.11.5 – Release: 2024/06/24
Fixed: A problem that occurred when activating the Premium version when the Lite version was still activated
Version 1.11.4 – Release: 2024/0514
Fixed: Issue with last update (mail queue list table error)
Version 1.11.3 – Release: 2024/04/04
Fixed: Admin list table search did only search in item title (#208)
Fixed: Admin list table search field disappeared on empty result
Version 1.11.2 – Release: 2024/02/10
Fixed: PHP 8.2 issues
Version 1.11.1 – Release: 2023/10/21
Fixed: The exclude filter did not work as expected (#191)
Fixed: An unhandled exception which could occur during certain WordPress events and not in general (#194)
Version 1.11.0 – Release: 2023/06/26
Added: Support for e-mail attachments (see online documentation)
Changed: Completely redesigned options section
Fixed: Items per page option did not work in list table screen options
Fixed: Translation issues
Version 1.10.2 – Release: 2023/05/11
Fixed: PHP 8 compatibility
Fixed: Minor Cross-Site Scripting issue
Version 1.10.1 – Release: 2022/12/10
Fixed: Options page tab navigation was broken due to not loaded CSS file
Fixed: Minor Cross-Site Scripting issue
Version 1.10.0 – Release: 2022/08/15
Added: Option to define how to handle shortcodes in mail templates (see “Options > Mail Templates”)
Version 1.9.10 – Release: 2022/04/15
Fixed: PHP 8.0, 8.1 compatibility
Version 1.9.9 – Release: 2021/06/15
Added: Advanced option “Postponed execution” which might help if rules don’t work as expected when creating posts via frontend
Added: Option “Identical emails threshold” which defines a time period in seconds within which PSN will attempt to block multiple identical emails.
Fixed: Translation issues
Fixed: PHP 8 improvements
Version 1.9.8 – Release: 2020/10/03
Fixed: PHPMailer issue
Accidentally skipped version 1.9.7
Version 1.9.6 – Release: 2020/08/10
Added: Reply-To support for email notifications
Fixed: PHP 7.4 issues
Fixed: Compatibility with WordPress 5.5
Fixed: Translation issues
Fixed: Minor layout issues
Version 1.9.5 – Release: 2019/07/06
Changed: Options page layout improved
Fixed: Support for ACF field type with non scalar values, like “Select”, “Post Object” and others
Fixed: Removed PHP Notices
Fixed: Issue with submit form of plugin “WP User Frontend”
Version 1.9.4 – Release: 2019/03/04
Added: Button to save and stay on page for mail template form
Fixed: Bulk actions did not work anymore
Fixed: PHP 7.x improvements
Fixed: Some database tables were not removed when the plugin was deleted
Version 1.9.3 – Release: 2018/10/17
Fixed: Error on plugin activation
Version 1.9.2 – Release: 14.10.2018
Fixed: Some PSN database tables have been created with type MyISAM. This has been removed to create default type which will be InnoDB in most cases.
Fixed: The initialization procedure of the plugin has been improved.
Version 1.9.1 – Release: 10.01.2018
Fixed: Improved error message handling (PHP notices were displayed on PSN admin pages)
Version 1.9.0 – Release: 23.05.2017
Added: Support for ACF custom fields improved
Added: New status “Not scheduled”
Added: New rule condition: Post ID whitelist / blacklist
Added: New rule condition: Exclude recipients by user ID or email address
Added: Custom rule match condition based on template syntax
Fixed: Rule match handling improved
Version 1.8.9 – Release: 05.05.2016
Fixed: Compatibility fix for PHP 7
Fixed: Minor fixes
Version 1.8.8 – Release: 13.12.2015
Added: New placeholders for post title and content diffs: [post_diff_title], [post_diff_content] (see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/content_diffs.html)
Fixed: Compatibility fix for PHP 7
Version 1.8.7 – Release: 28.11.2015
Added: New placeholder when running inside TO loop: [recipient_ID]
Added: New placeholder when running inside TO loop: [recipient_user_email]
Changed: Improved SMTP debug mode to not produce output in AJAX requests
Changed: HTML emails editor update
Fixed: On some hosters it could lead to issues with PHP open_basedir setting
Version 1.8.6 – Release: 05.11.2015
Bugfix: Whitespace in a script file caused PSN admin pages to result in an error after form submits
Bugfix: Passing emails to Mandrill could result in errors if custom FROM was used
Version 1.8.5 – Release: 28.10.2015
Added: New rule option “Exclude current user” with which you can exclude the current user who saves / updates the post from all recipients
Changed: License handling on multisite installations. Go to network settings / Post Status Notifier to activate the license network wide
Changed: License form moved to a dedicated tab section on default (non multisite) installations
Bugfix: Placeholders [post_status_before] and [post_status_after] could be empty
Bugfix: Custom FROM set in the option could lead to problems if format “Sender Name <sender@domain.com>” was used
Version 1.8.4 – Release: 18.09.2015
New placeholders: [post_categories_slugs], [post_categories_slugs_array], [post_tags_slugs], [post_tags_slugs_array] (thanks to syntax53 for the proposal)
Tweak: On multisite update, the PHP maximum execution timeout will be resetted to the default 30 seconds for every site to not run into a timeout with very large networks
Minor fixes
Version 1.8.3 – Release: 26.08.2015
Security improvements.
Version 1.8.2 – Release: 23.07.2015
Bugfix: Selftester could produce an error message about insufficient permissions.
Version 1.8.1 – Release: 09.07.2015
Tweak: Category handling improved: special characters in category names could not be matched
Tweak: Frontend post submission improved: Category filter did not work for posts submitted via frontend
Version 1.8 – Release: 27.04.2015
New feature: Rule trigger limitations see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/limitations.html
New feature: Dynamic recipients see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/dynamic_recipients.html
New feature: Late execution see: http://docs.ifeelweb.de/post-status-notifier/options.html#late-execution
New feature: Mandrill support (see Options / Advanced)
Redesigned options page for better overview
Version 1.7 – Release: 09.12.2014
New feature: Mail Queue (Deferred sending)
Improved logging: Shows detailed email contents now, including HTML mails
Bugfix: Placeholder [post_editlink] could not be replaced in case of users without edit rights changed the post status (e.g. if the permission exceeded in the meantime but he still gets emails)
Bugfix: Mail template HTML editor produced an JS error when opened in edit mode in Firefox
Version 1.6.3 – Release: 21.10.2014
Bugfix: Service section environment info metabox could break in certain cases
Bugfix: FROM was empty if no custom FROM was set
Improvement: Rule and mail template export could break when other plugins interfered via filters
Fix: Rule placeholder help screen showed “post_featured_image_src” which should be “post_featured_image_url”
Version 1.6.2 – Release: 15.09.2014
Bugfix in custom tags handling
Version 1.6.1 – Release: 14.09.2014
Major improvements for the support of Categories and Tags.
Major improvements for the support of Custom Fields
Major improvements for the support of Scheduled Posts.
Version 1.6 – Release: 23.08.2014
New feature: Support for conditions, loops, functions and filters in subject and body texts. Enables to access any kind of data attached to a post. Allows to create dynamic texts.
New feature: Block notifications options in Post submit box. Lets you decide to completely block notifications before you update / create a post.
New feature: One email per TO recipient. Notifications can get send in a loop with one email per TO recipient disregarding CC and BCC recipients. This feature is has Beta status.
New placeholder: [post_categories_array] Contains an array for easy use with filters
New placeholder: [post_tags_array] Contains an array for easy use with filters
New placeholder: [post_custom_fields_array] Contains an array for easy use with filters
New placeholder: [post_preview_25] Contains the first 25 words of the post content
New placeholder: [post_preview_50] Contains the first 50 words of the post content
New placeholder: [post_preview_75] Contains the first 75 words of the post content
New placeholder: [post_preview_100] Contains the first 100 words of the post content
New placeholder: [post_content_strip_tags] The post content without HTML tags
New placeholder: [post_featured_image_url] If a post has a featured image, this placeholders contains its URL
New placeholder: [post_featured_image_width] The featured image width
New placeholder: [post_featured_image_height] The featured image height
New placeholder: [recipient_first_name] Only works in “One email per TO recipient” mode. The firstname of the recipient if it is available in the user profile.
New placeholder: [recipient_last_name] Only works in “One email per TO recipient” mode. The lastname of the recipient if it is available in the user profile.
New custom post status: “Not trash” will match every status but “Trash”
Version 1.5.2 – Release: 03.06.2014
Bugfix: In some cases the service section produced an error message (Call to undefined function apache_get_version())
Version 1.5.1 – Release: 13.05.2014
Improvement: Duplicate recipients get removed
Bugfix: Fixed a bug in the Logger module (Sent emails haven’t been logged correctly)
Version 1.5 – Release: 06.05.2014
New feature: HTML mail support and email templates. Prepare your email templates once and select them for different notification rules.
New feature: Auto-update via WordPress backend. Never have to upload the files via FTP again. You have to enter your license code in the plugin’s settings.
New feature: More flexible To, Cc, Bcc selection. Multiple selections are possible now.
New feature: Editor restriction. Select one or more roles the editor of a post must be member of so that the notification will be generated.
New feature: Recipients lists. Manage email addresses without the need to create user accounts.
New custom post status “Not pending”: Matches all post status values except “pending”
New custom post status “Not private”: Matches all post status values except “private”
New placeholder [post_editlink]: Contains the backend edit URL
Removed post types “attachement”, “nav_menu_item” from rule settings as they are not treated like post types (have no status before/after)
Support for placeholders in FROM
Refactoring for performance improvements
Version 1.4.1 – Release: 11.02.2014
Bugfix: Missing translation class (http://codecanyon.net/item/post-status-notifier/4809420/comments?#comment_5883580)
Version 1.4 – Release: 05.02.2014
New custom placeholders which will specifically match custom categories and tags registered with your blog.
New feature:Dynamic placeholders: You will be able to fetch every custom field attached to your posts.
New feature: Placeholder filters. This is a very powerful feature. You can use all filters of the famous PHP template engine Twig to manipulate the output of all placeholders PSN offers you, including the new dynamic placeholders.
New feature: Import / Export notification rules
New feature: Copy notification rules
New feature: New recipient type “Individual e-mail”. Enter a custom e-mail address as main recipient (TO).
New feature: Custom sender e-mail. Define the notification sender per rule or as a default in the options.
New notification rule status “Not published”. This will match every post status but “publish”.
New placeholder: [post_format]
Version 1.3 – Release: 08.01.2014
New feature: Notification rules have a categories filter now
New placeholder: [post_permalink] can be used for notification texts. Contains the post’s permalink (uses WP internal get_permalink function)
Bugfix: Fixed a bug which occured when not logged in users changed post status in the frontend
Bugfix: German language fix
Improvement: Backend adjusted to new WordPress 3.8 layout

Version 1.2.1 – Release: 28.09.2013

Bugfix: Fixed a bug where scheduled items did not get notified when published by cron

Version 1.2 – Release: 12.09.2013

New feature: Notification rule recipient supports user roles (default and custom roles) and special all users
Improvement: The plugin now is completely multisite compatible
Bugfix: Single quotes in blog name will be shown correctly now

Version 1.1 – Release: 22.08.2013

New feature: Bcc field. Set Bcc recipients for your notification rules.
New feature: SMTP mode. If you want to send many notifications and have a SMTP mail server, PSN now supports it. You find all necessary SMTP settings in the options section.
New feature: Plugin selftester. The plugin ships with some selftesting routines you can trigger manually in the plugin dashboard.
Minor bugfixing: Now fully compatible with Windows Server 2008 / PHP 5.2

Version 1.0.3 – Release: 07.06.2013

Further improvements: Removed dependency to PDO at all

Version 1.0.2 – Release: 03.06.2013

Bugfix: Recipient “Post author” did not work for notification rules
Bugfix: Plugin activation could produce error with PHP 5.2 (Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM …)

Version 1.0.1 – Release: 31.05.2013

Removed dependency to PHP pdo_mysql (framework database models now work with native wpdb object)
Improved backwards compatibility up to WP 3.3 (tested on 3.3.x / 3.4.x / 3.5.x)
Adjusted log timestamp format to blog date/time settings

Version 1.0.0 – Initial Release: 26.05.2013