Notification templates

Every notification your site can raise, grouped by the plugin it comes from, with its wording and its three channels under your control.

Find it on your site under Memberside → Notifications.

Before you start

Where	Memberside → Notifications on your WordPress site
Who	Anyone who can manage options
Plan	Every plan

How it is organised

One section per plugin. WordPress first, then every integration you have active — Followers, Friends, Private Messages, Social Activity, Groups, User Photos, Reviews, User Bookmarks, JobBoardWP, ForumWP, bbPress, Event Tickets, WooCommerce, myCRED and BuddyPress.

The BuddyPress section behaves differently from the rest, because BuddyPress raises notifications of its own — see the BuddyPress section below.

A plugin you do not have installed still appears, greyed out, with its notification types listed. That is deliberate: it shows what installing it would add, rather than hiding the answer.

Renaming a section

Each section is headed by the plugin that raises its notifications — “Ultimate Member - Friends”, “Ultimate Member - Social Activity”. That answers which plugin is this?, which is your question here and nobody else’s: your members have never heard of Ultimate Member, and the same headings appear on their notification settings screens in the app.

So each section carries a Rename link. Give it what your members should see — “Friends”, “Activity” — and the app uses that heading. The admin side keeps showing which plugin the section really is, so you can still tell two of them apart.

Leave the box empty and the heading goes back to the plugin’s own name, which is also what happens if you type the plugin name in yourself: an override identical to the default is not stored, so a plugin that renames itself later is still picked up.

Two sections renamed to the same heading become one section in the app, with both sets of notifications under it. That is usually what you want — “Friends” and “Followers” as one “People” — and it is only the app that merges them.

What you can change per notification

Control	What it does
In-app, Email, Push	Whether that notification uses that channel at all. Off here means off for every member
Lock	Members cannot switch this channel off for themselves
Wording	The text, per channel
Delay	How long to wait before sending the email or the push

Switching a channel off site-wide removes it from every member’s settings screen, rather than leaving a switch that does nothing.

Writing the wording

Each channel has two versions of its text, and both are worth writing:

• One — a single event. {actor} liked your photo.
• Several — the same thing happened more than once and folded into one notification. {actor} and {others_count} others liked your photo.

A notification with no “several” wording falls back to its “one” wording, which reads oddly once four people have joined in.

Email additionally has a subject for each case. Push has a title.

Placeholder tags

Tags are written in curly braces and replaced when the notification is sent. Every notification can use these:

Tag	Becomes
{actor}	The person who did it — the most recent, when several did
{actor_count}	How many people, counting the actor
{others_count}	How many people besides the actor
{recipient_name}	The member being notified
{object_title}	What it is about — the post, the photo, the group
{object_url}	A link to it
{site_name}	Your site’s name
{site_url}	Your site’s address
{time}	How long ago

Each notification also has its own tags, listed beside its editor — a comment notification offers {post_title} and {comment_excerpt}, a group one offers {group_name}, and so on.

A tag that is not on that notification’s list is left as written. So a typo shows up as {atcor} in the message rather than as a blank, which is what tells you it is a typo.

Tags are escaped when they are replaced. A member whose display name contains HTML cannot inject it into anyone else’s notification list.

Delays, and why they exist

Email and push wait before sending — by default a minute for push, ten minutes for email.

That pause is what lets several events become one message. Four people commenting inside the window produce one push reading “and 3 others”, not four banners. It also means a member who has already opened the app and read the notification does not get the push at all.

Shorten it for anything urgent. Set it to zero to send immediately, and accept a banner per event.

The in-app notification is never delayed.

BuddyPress is the one that pushes back

Every other plugin here just raises events. BuddyPress keeps a notification list of its own, so switching one of its eleven events on does two things: Memberside starts raising it, and BuddyPress stops.

That is what keeps members from being told twice. Switching the event back off hands it to BuddyPress again.

The group events keep BuddyPress’s email. For group invitations, join requests, approvals, refusals and promotions, BuddyPress sends its email from the same code that writes its notification — there is no way to stop one without stopping the other. So we stop neither: Memberside removes the notification it just wrote and leaves the email alone. That is why those five ship with Memberside’s own email switched off. Turn it on and Memberside’s email replaces BuddyPress’s, rather than both arriving.

To move everything at once, switch off Notifications under Settings → BuddyPress → Components. Members keep every notification below, but a Notifications (BuddyPress) screen in your app will be empty — replace it with Notifications first.

One caveat: if you use BuddyPress member invitations, move events across one at a time rather than switching the component off. With it off, BuddyPress errors when somebody accepts an invitation — a gap in BuddyPress, not in these settings.

Restoring the original wording

Clear a field and save. An empty field means “use the wording Memberside ships”, so the notification goes back to its default — and keeps getting improvements to that default in later releases.

When it does not work

Symptom	Cause	Fix
A plugin’s section is greyed out	The plugin is not active	Activate it; its notifications start working with no further setup
A notification never arrives on any channel	Its channels are all off	Switch at least one on
Members still receive one they turned off	The channel is locked	Turn the lock off for that channel, or leave it on if that is deliberate
The “several” wording never appears	The notification does not cluster	Direct messages, friend requests and replies are never folded — by design
A tag prints literally	It is not one of that notification’s tags	Check the list beside the editor for the exact spelling
Email wording changes did nothing	The notification had already been sent	Templates apply when a notification is sent, and retroactively to ones still in the list
Push arrives with the site name as its title	That notification has no push title	Add one