Notifications

What members have missed: replies, reactions, follows, mentions, group invites and anything else your site raises — as a list in the app, an unread badge on the nav, and optionally an email or a push notification.

Memberside raises, stores and writes these itself, across every plugin it integrates with. No notification extension is required.

Before you start

Plugin	None. Notifications are built in
Endpoint group	Notifications
Plan	Every plan

Add it to your app

Drag Notifications onto a navigation bar. The upper or top nav is where a bell is expected; a bottom-nav slot works in a community where notifications drive most return visits.

Settings

Setting	What it does	Default
Title, Description	Shown at the top	Empty
Restrictions	Which roles see the tab	Everyone

Which notifications exist, what they say, and which channels they use are set on your site under Memberside → Notifications, not in the builder — see Notification templates.

Clustering

Five people liking the same post is one notification, not five.

Repeated activity about the same thing folds together while it is unread: “Ada and 4 others liked your photo”. The count rises as more people join in. Once a member reads it, the next like starts a fresh notification — so a notification they have already seen never silently reappears.

This applies to the push and the email too. Several likes inside a short window produce one push, carrying the clustered wording, rather than a burst of banners. Notification types where folding would destroy the point — a direct message, a friend request, a reply written to you personally — are never clustered.

What your members see

A list of notifications with an unread badge on the nav item. Tapping one opens what it refers to.

The notifications list and its unread badge

Place the features notifications point at

A notification about a comment is only useful if tapping it opens the thread. Before relying on notifications, place:

• Activity Thread for feed replies and reactions.
• Connections for friend requests.
• Profile for anything about a member.
• Single Post for post comments.

Without these, a notification arrives and opens a web view instead of a screen.

The three channels

Every notification type can be delivered three ways, and each is switched separately.

In-app is this feature: the list and the badge, read from your site.

Email is sent by your site through wp_mail(), so whatever SMTP plugin you already use carries it. The wording is yours to edit.

Push is delivered by the operating system when the app is closed. It needs two things, and setting only the first is the usual reason it does not arrive:

1. Credentials on your site — an Apple push key for iOS, a Firebase service account for Android, under Memberside → API Keys. See Connection and API keys.
2. The Push service connected — under Memberside → Services, authorised against your Memberside account. See Push.

Keys alone send nothing. The service holds the device registry and does the delivering; without it your site has credentials and nowhere to use them.

Push cannot be tested in the preview. It only exists in a compiled app on a real device — and only in a build made after you added the credentials, because they are compiled in.

Members choose their own combination per notification type, across two tabs in Settings — Email Notification for the inbox, In-app Notification for the list and the phone. You can lock a type so they cannot opt out of it. See Notification preferences.

Realtime

Without Realtime, the unread badge updates when the member refreshes. With it, the badge updates as notifications arrive.

If you already run BuddyPress

BuddyPress has a notification list of its own, so for a while you have two. That is a normal state to be in, not a misconfiguration — you move across one event at a time.

Under Memberside → Notifications, the BuddyPress section lists eleven events: mentions, replies to your update, replies to your comment, friend request, friend request accepted, group invitation, request to join your group, request accepted, request declined, promoted in a group, and new message.

Switching one on takes it over. BuddyPress stops adding that event to its own list, so members see it once rather than twice. Switching it back off hands the event to BuddyPress again.

Two things worth knowing before you start:

• The group events keep BuddyPress’s email. BuddyPress sends it from the same code that writes the notification, so we leave it alone and Memberside’s email for those stays off. Turn Memberside’s on for one of them and it replaces BuddyPress’s rather than arriving alongside it.
• You can hand over everything at once by switching off Notifications under Settings → BuddyPress → Components. Members keep every notification, but a Notifications (BuddyPress) screen in your app will be empty — replace it with this one.
• If you use BuddyPress member invitations, move events one at a time instead. With the Notifications component switched off, BuddyPress itself errors when somebody accepts an invitation. That is a gap in BuddyPress rather than in these settings, and handing events over individually avoids it.
• Members who opted out of a BuddyPress email stay opted out. Taking an event over reads their answer from BuddyPress’s own settings screen, so handing one across does not start emailing people who already said no. It applies to email only, because that is the only question BuddyPress asked — the In-app Notification tab is where the member answers for the list and the phone.

If you already run Ultimate Member - Real-time Notifications

You can keep it. Your existing notification history is imported, the types any other plugin registered against it still appear in your list, and its web notification centre goes on working.

Each notification type moves across one at a time, so nothing switches over in a single step. Until a type is moved, that extension keeps writing it exactly as before.

If you delete Memberside

Deleting the plugin from WordPress removes the notification history, every member’s preferences, your edited templates and anything still queued for delivery. Deactivating does not — it leaves all of it in place, so switching the plugin off to test something is safe.

There is no export, so take a database backup first if the history matters.

When it does not work

Symptom	Cause	Fix
Nothing from Notes	Notes raise no notification	A note belongs to the member who wrote it and is not addressed to anyone, so there is nobody to tell
BuddyPress events are missing	They have not been handed over yet	Memberside → Notifications, BuddyPress section — switch on the ones you want. Until then BuddyPress keeps raising them in its own list
A BuddyPress event appears twice	It is raised in both lists	Hand it over in Memberside → Notifications; taking it over stops BuddyPress adding it to its own list
The list is empty	The Notifications group is off	Enable it under Memberside → REST API
A notification type never arrives	It is switched off site-wide	Memberside → Notifications, find it under its plugin, switch the channel on
A handed-over BuddyPress event emails nobody	Those members answered “No, do not send email” on BuddyPress’s settings screen and that answer is honoured	Expected. A member overrules it from the Email Notification tab in the app
Nothing at all from one plugin	That plugin is inactive	Its group is greyed out in the template manager and names what is missing
Tapping a notification does nothing	The feature it points at is not placed	Place it, per the list above
No push notifications at all	The Push service is not connected	Connect it under Memberside → Services
Keys are set but nothing arrives	Credentials were entered but never accepted	Open the Push panel and choose Test & install — it reports exactly what Apple or Google said
Android works, iOS does not	No Apple .p8, or the wrong APNs environment	Add the key; if it is a debug build installed from Xcode, switch on Apple sandbox in the Push panel
iOS works, Android does not	No Firebase service account, or no google-services.json	Add both under Memberside → API Keys, then rebuild
Nothing on one member’s phone	They declined the notification permission	They can re-enable it in their phone’s own settings
It worked, then stopped	The monthly allowance is spent	Check the Push panel; notifications past the cap are not delivered later
Push does not work in preview	Push needs a real device	Build and install
The badge only updates on refresh	Realtime is not connected	Realtime
Email and push arrive late	Both wait a short window so repeated activity folds into one	Expected; shorten the delay per type in the template manager
Email never arrives, in-app does	Your site cannot send mail	Test with any SMTP plugin’s own send test — Memberside uses wp_mail()