I have used Toolset to create a basic forum/learning community system: hidden link
Now the client would like to add a function whereby users can subscribe to responses to discussion threads. In this case a discussion thread is a post in one of three post types (forums) - responses are child posts of the original post.
I guess I can code the site to amend the 'post updated' date, which could then trigger the sending of notifications, but I don't know of any notification plugin which can be set to individual posts like this. It's really the function of a proper forum plugin, which is perhaps what I should have used instead of building it in Toolset.
My question is - are you aware of any notification plugin solution that can do this - I guess it is a similar requirement to what this support forum has?
The original post and child posts are of different post types and this is a Types post relationship? Or the post type is hierarchical (like pages) and the original post can have child posts of the same type?
In any case, the child posts (the replies) are published with a front-end Toolset Form?
So that form can include a notification, and then the issue simply becomes how it knows which emails to send the notification to. Said email addresses being stored on the parent original post.
Hi Nigel. Currently each of the three forums is its own post type, and child posts are of the same type. Users should be able to subscribe to the thread - i.e. the original post, I guess - via a button.
I'm beginning to think that I should have gone with BBPress and modified it to add extra functionality that the client needs (like taxonomies on posts) because this is all basic forum functionality (like thread subscriptions).
It seems like you would need some customisation for subscribing that added the email address of the subscriber to an array of subscribers which is stored on the parent post.
Then the form which publishes the child post replies includes the notification sent on submission, where the emails would be harvested from the top level post in the hierarchy, and that in itself would require a custom solution.
I know there are some notification plugins out there but I'm not sure how they would help inasmuch as you would surely need some customisation to achieve the same as the above.
The simplest solution would perhaps be to use WordPress comments for the replies, there are quite a few plugins for subscribing to comments....
Thanks Nigel - this is phase two of the project, and the client has come up with a whole lot more requirements (notifications being one) that are making this start to look much more like a forum, so I think the answer is actually going to be switching to bbPress.
We considered using comments initially, but they needed all kinds of fields and attachments in the replies, so that wasn't going to work.
