Emailing contributer when comment is approved

Much of the mailing functions in 2.5.1 don’t work. Set up a brand new blog, never got mailed the admin password for my files. Approved comments don’t get notified. However, pingbacks do seem to happen.

This is a case of an “upgrade” and degraded the product.

I was trying to do this very thing on a blog, and it was driving me nuts. Here’s the code I used that finally worked:

function notify_approval_to_contributor ($comment_id){
	$comment = get_comment($comment_id);
	if ($comment->comment_approved == 1) {
		$postdata = get_post($comment->comment_post_ID);
		$author = get_userdata($postdata->post_author);
		mail(
			$author->user_email,
			'New comment on your article "'. stripslashes($postdata->post_title),
			stripslashes($comment->comment_content)
		);
	}
}

add_action('wp_set_comment_status', 'notify_approval_to_contributor');
add_action('edit_comment', 'notify_approval_to_contributor');

Initially, it was only working when comments were approved by clicking the checkboxes to perform multiple updates and then clicking Approve. Clicking the individual Approve links to do it “Ajax-style” wasn’t working. This was because I was only using the wp_set_comment_status action. I needed to add in the action for edit_comment as well. Once I was handling both actions, it worked beautifully. I hope this helps.