Notify – Connecting with Your WordCamp Attendees

Notify is a tool built into all WordCampWordCamp WordCamps are casual, locally-organized conferences covering everything related to WordPress. They’re one of the places where the WordPress community comes together to teach one another what they’ve learned throughout the year and share the joy. Learn more. sites via the Camptix pluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party, which allows you to notify your WordCamp Attendees (i.e people who have purchased tickets) via email. This is useful for sending them specific information that is relevant to their attending the WordCamp and getting the best experience from WordCamp.

You can access the Notify feature in your WordCamp site from Tickets -> Attendees and then clicking the Notify tab.

Filtering the attendee list for Notify emails.

In order to send a Notify email, you will need to determine who will receive this email (building up the To: list). This is possible by creating conditions which the attendees must match, in order to include them in the list. For example, you might want to send an email to all attendees who have purchased a specific ticket type, or all attendees who have purchased a ticket after a certain date.

You can select whether or not the attendees must match all of the conditions you’ve created or any of the conditions you’ve created. This is selected from the first field in the filterFilter Filters are one of the two types of Hooks https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Hooks. They provide a way for functions to modify data of other functions. They are the counterpart to Actions. Unlike Actions, filters are meant to work in an isolated manner, and should never have side effects such as affecting global variables and output. conditions section by selecting either any or all in the the ‘Attendees matching’ dropdown.

You can then define your conditions. Conditions are created using the three dropdowns which follow this format – Field (first dropdown), Comparison (second dropdown) Value (third dropdown).

Depending on the status and activity on your WordCamp site the options in these three dropdowns may vary.

On a brand new WordCamp site the Field dropdown only contains Purchased Ticket, Purchase Date and Coupon code used, whereas a site close to the actual WordCamp date includes fields from the ticket purchase form like Dietary Requirements and WordPress skill level.

The Value dropdown will either correspond with the Field selected (for example selecting Purchased Ticket changes the Value field to the available ticket types) or a simple text box, in which you can type the value you’re searching for. Depending on which type of Field you select, will determine which options are available in Value for that condition.

The Comparison dropdown options change depending on the Field selected and the possible Values for that field. If the Values are specific it shows is/is not, being a specific Field/Value match. If the Field is a date field, it allows for before or after that date, and if the Value option is a text field it contains is, is not, contains, does not contain, starts with and does not start with.

Is and is not mean the search will performed will be an exact match (or not), contains and does not contain will do partial string matches and starts with and does not start with will perform partial matches but on the beginning of the Field data being searched.

A note on date fields

If the Field you have selected is a date field (ie Purchase Date) then the Value option changes to a text box. In this text box you can enter any valid English string date. For example, 6/28/2018, 28-06-2018 and 18-06-28 are all valid string dates.

To avoid potential ambiguity, it’s best to use the (YYYY-MM-DD) date format (2018-06-28)

Finally you can also add multiple conditions by which to filter your list.

Message content

Once you’ve defined your conditions, you can enter an email Subject and a Message to be sent to the list. The Message field supports a predefined list of shortcodes ([first_name], [last_name], [email], [ticket_url]) you can add to the email, which will be replaced with the actual attendee data. This is a nice way to personalize the notification email. You can also make use of a predefined set of HTMLHTML HTML is an acronym for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is a markup language that is used in the development of web pages and websites. tags, which are listed below the message area.