Web Tutorial: The Self-affirmations WordPress Plugin (Part 4/4)

Having written a function to generate email, we will now send it!

Email in WordPress can be a tricky issue. Sure, we can use the native function wp_mail(). However, it is, half the time, going to fail depending on your server settings which you do not always have control over. Thus, it's advised to use an email plugin.

The one I am using for this, is WP Mail SMTP. Feel free to use your own. I used my email account at Google to configure WP Mail SMTP. Again, you may use any other method to configure it; this just happened to be the most convenient for me. Just read through the documentation, do a test send, and Bob's your uncle!

Once you have this out of the way, let's focus on writing the job that will send email on a regular basis. This is the function tt_selfaffirmations(). We begin by declaring list, and using it to store the result returned by running tt_get_readytoreceive(). Then we iterate through each element of list. There should be only one, though if you haven't reset the LAST_SENT column in your Oracle APEX database, it will be 0.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_selfaffirmations()
{
    $list = tt_get_readytoreceive();

    foreach($list as $l)
    {

    }
}

In the Foreach loop, we get the string name by concatenating the first_name and last_name properties of the current element, with a space in between. Then using the value of name, and the current element's email, gender and dob properties, we get the email array by running tt_generate_mail().

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_selfaffirmations()
{
    $list = tt_get_readytoreceive();

    foreach($list as $l)
    {
        $name = $l->first_name . " " . $l->last_name;
        $email = tt_generate_mail($l->email, $name, $l->gender, $l->dob);
    }
}

In this If block, we run wp_mail() using the email property, the title property of email and the body property of email with an "unsubscribe" line appended to the end. The rest of the arguments aren't that crucial. See the wp_email() function description here.

In essence, we're checking if the email was sent with no error.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_selfaffirmations()
{
    $list = tt_get_readytoreceive();

    foreach($list as $l)
    {
        $name = $l->first_name . " " . $l->last_name;
        $email = tt_generate_mail($l->email, $name, $l->gender, $l->dob);

        if (wp_mail($l->email, $email["title"], $email["body"] . "\n\nTo unsubscribe to the Self-affirmations Mailing List, please reply to this email with the subject 'UNSUBSCRIBE'.", "", [] ))
        {

        }
    }
}

If so, we should run the tt_set_lastsent() function to set the LAST_SENT column of that record to today's date so the email won't get sent a second time.

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_selfaffirmations()
{
    $list = tt_get_readytoreceive();

    foreach($list as $l)
    {
        $name = $l->first_name . " " . $l->last_name;
        $email = tt_generate_mail($l->email, $name, $l->gender, $l->dob);

        if (wp_mail($l->email, $email["title"], $email["body"] . "\n\nTo unsubscribe to the Self-affirmations Mailing List, please reply to this email with the subject 'UNSUBSCRIBE'.", "", [] ))
        {
            tt_set_lastsent($l->email);
        }
    }
}

If you run the Test job link, this is what you should see. tt_get_readytoreceive() was run, followed by tt_get_terms() followed by tt_generate_email().

More importantly, this should appear in your inbox!

So the sending of email is good to go. Time to set up the CRON job. For this, I use the WP Crontrol plugin. After activating the plugin, go to Tools, then Cron Events.

Once you click on Add New, you should be redirected to this interface. We'll use "cron_selfaffirmations" as the hook name, and set it to run once daily.

Once you confirm, you should see it in the list.

What next? Well, go back to your plugin file. Add this line. It basically uses the add_action() function to link the tt_selfaffirmations() function with the cron_selfaffirmations hook. Thus when the CRON job kicks in, it will run tt_selfaffirmations()!

wp-content/plugins/tt_selfaffirmations/tt_selfaffirmations.php

function tt_selfaffirmations()
{
    $list = tt_get_readytoreceive();

    foreach($list as $l)
    {
        $name = $l->first_name . " " . $l->last_name;
        $email = tt_generate_mail($l->email, $name, $l->gender, $l->dob);

        if (wp_mail($l->email, $email["title"], $email["body"] . "\n\nTo unsubscribe to the Self-affirmations Mailing List, please reply to this email with the subject 'UNSUBSCRIBE'.", "", [] ))
        {
            tt_set_lastsent($l->email);
        }
    }
}

add_action("cron_selfaffirmations", "tt_selfaffirmations");

If you reset your LAST_SENT column in the Oracle APEX database, the email will be sent when the job next runs. Set it to tun 5 minutes from now and see if it works!

That's all!

Thank you for staying with me! This was fun, y'all. And I didn't even have to write all that much code!

Your Greatest Fan,
T___T