Sometimes it’s handy to be able to just send the contents of a page that you’re viewing to your inbox or to someone else you think might be interested. This plugin allows a visitor to send a post or page or just a snippet (the blog owner’s choice) from an email address of their choice to an email address of their choice. The plugin has a plethora of options allowing you to specify how much of pages and posts should be sent, how the email forms should be displayed, how the email message is formatted, and more.

Lester Chan, aka GaMerZ, has produced quite a few plugins and he has a single page from which you can download all of them. He’s also provided a documentation page for each of his plugins as well as a forum. Bravo!

Overall Grade: A
Plugin Name: WP-Email
Version: 2.11
Plugin URI: http://www.lesterchan.net/porfolio/programming.php
WordPress Plugin Page: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-email/
Description: Allows people to recommend/send your WordPress blog’s post/page to a friend.
Author: Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan
Author URI: http://www.lesterchan.net/
Documentation: http://lesterchan.net/wordpress/readme/wp-email.html
Forum: http://forums.lesterchan.net/index.php?board=13.0/
Installation

Installation of the plugin itself is fairly simple.  Just copy the plugin to a folder called email and then activate it, then go to your wp-admin page and navigate to Options -> Permalinks and update your permalink structure.

However, in order to actually use the plugin without errors, you also need to make sure your PHP installation has a few extra extensions installed.  I installed the following extensions:

  • GD2 for generating a graphic image for the image verification feature.
  • IMAP, POP3, and SMTP to actually send email.  I probably only needed SMTP, but I went ahead and installed all three.
Administration

As I mentioned, there are a plethora of options available to manage this plugin.  It adds an extra top-level tab called E-Mail which contains two sub-tabs - Manage E-Mail and E-Mail Options.

The Manage E-Mail tab allows you to view a log of all the attempts to send email with a variety of sorting options.

The E-Mail Options tab is where the meat of administration occurs.  On this tab you can set the following options:

  • SMTP Settings
    Here you set the username, password, and server name for sending email via SMTP.  I think these settings are only used if method used is set to SMTP, but I didn’t try the others.
  • E-Mail Styles
    • What text to display on a page or post.
    • Whether to display text only, icon only, both text and icon, or custom display (very flexible).
    • Which icon to display (out of two).
    • Whether to present the email form in the same browser window or as a popup.
  • E-Mail Settings
    • Which fields to include in the email (it’s not clear but this might apply only to emails that only include an excerpt).
    • What type of content to include in the email (HTML or plain text)
    • Method to use to send email (PHP, SendMail, or SMTP).
    • Number of words to include.  If you specify 0, the whole page or post is included.  Anything else allows the visitor to send only an excerpt of the page or post.
    • Interval between emails.  This is a spam-prevention feature which allows you to specify how many minutes the visitor (based on IP address) must wait before sending another email.
    • Maximum number of multiple emails.  This specifies the maximum number of addresses the email can be sent to.
    • Enable image verification.  This is another spam-prevention feature requiring the visitor to type in the sequence of characters displayed in a little graphic image.  It is highly recommended that you enable this feature.  If this is enabled, the GD2 PHP extension must be installed.
  • Templates
    • E-Mail Page Templates - A series of templates for generating the email form for the visitor to fill out to send the email.
    • E-Mail Templates - A series of templates for generating the actual email to send.
    • After Sending E-Mail Templates - A series of templates for generating success and failure pages.
    • E-Mail Misc Templates - A template for generating a page for when general errors occur.
Usage

This plugin requires modifying your theme as it modifies the part of the web page that is theme specific. In any page that does this:

<?php while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>

add this somewhere below it:

<?php if(function_exists('email_link')) { email_link(); } ?>

This will place the text/icon (as specified in the options) at that place on the web page.  You can also simply type email_link between square brackets (’[' and ']‘) anywhere in a post or page and the configured text/icon will be displayed there - I can’t actually show you as it will get replaced on this page with the configured text if I do :-? .

The plugin also provides some statistical functions to display email totals.

Conclusion

This is a fairly complex plugin, but also quite useful once you get it configured.  I plan on installing this on all my WordPress sites.

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