Email Notifications with Iptanus File Upload Plugin

The Iptanus File Upload plugin can send an email whenever files are uploaded. The recipients, the subject and the body — along with a number of more advanced settings — are all shortcode attributes, but you will rarely need to write them by hand.

Setting up a notification

The easiest way is the plugin’s shortcode composer. Open it, go to the Notifications tab and switch on Notify by Email:

Fill in Email Recipients on the right, as a comma-separated list of addresses. To include the address of the person who uploaded the files, add the dynamic variable %useremail% — either type it, or double-click the button below the box.

Email Subject and Email Body come with defaults you can change. Plenty of dynamic variables are available — user name, user email, filename, file path, post ID and more. If your upload form has additional fields for the visitor to fill in, those can go into the message too, through the button.

To send the uploaded files themselves along with the message, switch on Attach Uploaded Files.

Advanced options

Email headers let you set the rest: whether the message is plain text or HTML, the address and name it appears to come from, and so on. Put them in the Email Headers box:

If you need the message built in PHP — a recipient list, subject or body worked out at the moment of upload — use the wfu_before_email_notification filter. You can write it into the plugin itself with its Code Hooks feature.

If the emails never arrive

Sometimes the notification is set up correctly and no email is sent. This is usually not the plugin: it is the site’s outgoing mail settings, or a restriction on the web server.

The usual remedy is an SMTP plugin such as WP Mail SMTP. Plugins of that kind reconfigure WordPress’s wp_mail() function to send through SMTP rather than PHP’s mail(). Several free ones are available on wordpress.org, each with its own setup instructions.

If you have questions or need more information, please contact us.

The Iptanus team