CoPress

I've been really disappointed by the quality of the e-mail notification plugins that are available out there.  (So many of them simply do not function as advertised!)  My newsroom's editing flow requires a complex system of post status change notifications, and (ideally) e-mail notifications to single or multiple people depending on whose byline is on the story.  In short, nobody has enough time to check queues or see if their stories have been posted – they need e-mail notifications pushed to them (and in our organization we're not allowed to download any new software for security reasons without jumping through a hundred hoops, so we can't take advantage of WordPress' wonderful RSS feeds).  Oh, and our writers need to cut and paste WordPress posts into Outlook e-mail templates… always a lot of fun.

The Editflow custom post statuses have been very useful for us,  but I'm wondering how to find out more about the status of the whole project (I see the timeline, but don't know if various stages have actually been completed?)   Does anyone know of any e-mail notification plugins for posts (not comments) that actually work well?

The custom post statuses from Edit Flow are terrific.  Really a problem solver!

Thanks!  as soon as things die down around here I'll give it a try!

I'm curious to see how you have implemented e-mail upon status changes… since every similar plugin I've used seems to not know how to handle Edit Flow's custom statuses.

As you know (because you've taken the time to write this plugin!), editing flows are pretty idiosyncratic depending on your organization.  In my case, we have contributors who need to be notified only when their story goes live; but we have editors who need to be notified that something has changed from one particular status to another, signifying that they need to log in to WordPress and edit the stuff.  I suspect they'd rather not know whenever the status changes to something that doesn't require their action, although I suppose they could just filter those e-mails out or something.

Example of our workflow- (which now use the initial version of Edit Flow custom statuses)-

Contributor submits a post, it becomes Pending Review (which Editor A needs to know about)

Editor A edits the post, it becomes Final Review Needed (which Editor B needs to know about)

Editor B edits the post, it becomes Ready to Publish (which Editor C needs to know about)

Editor C publishes the post, which the Contributor needs to know about.

in short… we have a rather long editing train, and people who are too busy to log in and check WordPress queues, so e-mail notifications become important.  So, I don't know how that addresses your question about what granularity is required.   I was curious about how you approached the notification issue because I know WordPress doesn't have hooks for these custom statuses, right?  (just a hook for any status change…)