I have a CRED form that allows my users to run an inspection process.
The goal would be to have a followup email sent to the user before the next inspection date by defining a number of days or months.
I see the ability to send the notification based on conditions, but there is no condition to define sending a notification at a certain future time or date.
How can I create a notification that will be sent in "X" amount of days or months? Is there a hook that can be made for this associated with the specific CRED ID.
If I know the user will run an inspection for example, annually, I would like to notify them a week or 2 before the next inspection date as a reminder.
If CRED had the ability to create an email "DRIP" this feature would be pretty powerful.
Shane could you escalate this request to another support tier?
There is no type of post expiration that applies to my situation. The custom post type never expires and I can't imagine for my project, why it would make sense to.
It seems like there would be a more creative way to achieve my goal. I am just uncertain what that is at the moment. With toolset already doing most of the heavy lifting to not only send notifications but also do this with conditions, it seems like the request would be very possible.
One method would be through custom function, in which case assistance with that would be very appreciated. OR - in some particular way to create a hidden variable or custom field of the post date and set a condition on this notification to send if date "=" or is greater then a future date.
Im pretty confident that there is another way to achieve this.
Yes, I would still like higher support tier to offer their suggestion.
Again, if it can be done conditionally already from the options that exist, I would like to do that. Perhaps I just don't know the method in which to set that up correctly.
Such as the instance I mentioned in which to check a variable or post date and then create a condition. Although that seems "Hacky", it might be possible.
My only other option which I prefer not to use ....is to send an email to a third party service such as mailchimp, in which case I would start to incur costs to send emails, which I think is unnecessary.
This is Juan, lead developer here at Toolset. Thanks a lot for your feedback.
Shane was right, we do not have such a feature.
CRED is not a notification system by itself. It has some notification options built into it, like sending emails when somethign related on a form happens. It also has, as Shane pointed out, a "post expiration" feature. Besides its name, it is not only meant to expire posts (you do not need to change a post status to use it, for example), but a notification scheduler. You can see details here: https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/automatic-post-expiration/
I do think it is powerful enough to cover what you are expecting: as of now: you can only get the notification once, as the single post expiration date approaches, but you can "renew" it so it is fired again when the time comes.
As you can see in the documentation link I sent you, you can set the post "expiration" date when a post is created on a CRED form, and send a notification some days before the post "expires". What you are lacking is a way to set a new post expiration date when the user comes and does its recurring inspection process.
Now, on that process, is the user creating a new post using a CRED form, or editing an existing one? If he is creating a new post, setting the poste xpiration for it on creation will indeed make this a looped process, whene each new post creates the future notification for the next time. If he is editing the same post once and again, then you just need to use the CRED hooks here: https://toolset.com/documentation/user-guides/cred-api/#csc
and update the custom field for the edited post where we store the "expiration" date. It has a meta_key of "_cred_post_expiration_time" and the data is stored as a timestamp.
However, I see your point. We have had some suggestions about CRED notifications lately, and we see the need to extend its notification capabilities. I am creating a ticket in our internal tracking system to evaluate and iterate this.
So, if I am understanding correctly, using the post expiration option does not necessarily do anything to the post itself after it expires? It doesn't delete or remove it from the backend?
This solution might actually work.
1. Currently, my Inspection CRED is a child post from its parent CPT "Inventory Item"
2. So, each time (annually) and inspection is run, we are creating a new post (which might be helpful in my situation) as we are not editing/updating an existing Inspection post.
So, the suggestion to use a post expiration of 1 year would work for this? Could you confirm?
Does a post's "expiration" status hinder or effect the post in any other way? I am trying to prevent any unforeseen issues.
Additional Note: Yes, I think any enhancements that you make for notifications would be a significant benefit to Toolset. The existing options that are built in so far to send multiple notifications and provide conditions are excellent!
I think most customers would agree, the more we can do with toolset, it eliminates the need use 1 or several additional third party plugins which can cause a bunch of issues, including website performance.
Yes, when you set the post "expiration" feature you can decide what will happen to the post once it gets "expired". The options include changing its status to a fixed one (draft, pending, etc) or, and this is the one you would use, keep the current status. In that case, as long as you do not add custom actions in PHP, no further effect should be applied to the post at all.
So it should be safe to use, yes.
Thanks again for the feedback. We will consider changes and improvements to this notification system.
