Wow, that’s a lot of negative feedback in one message. I don’t expect you’ll get much help here using that tone. Do remember that this plugin was available for free and that the developer is using his free time to develop it. If you try again using a nicer tone, I’m sure someone will help you out.
don’t understand what you find so negative in my tone? I just explained exactely what happened. And was not nice, no. Maybe it’s my issue, but do not really know how to put it to sound “nicer”. If the message was killed, I really meant that. The content vanished. How else you call that?
As for the “free” issue – I also offer work for free at occasions, but I make no difference between the quality of that work and paid work. If I decided to offer it for free, I do it to the end, you know?
Now, having a short “how to” section together with the plugin will save 70% of these questions, you know? No need to write a novel, just a few essential things …
The only thing I figured out with those messages was … don’t dare touch the order & meaning of the placeholders from the sample messages. And do not dare add an extra s% placeholder in your message either, or it will mess up everything. As long as you limit yourself at wrapping some text around the default message, you’ll be fine.
Thank me 🙂
Thanks for explaining a bit more about what your problem was. I’m not a professional developer, but as far as I know you can’t add strings (%s) if they’re not in the plugin code. The %s are there so that the plugin knows where to put certain phrases.
Do upgrade to BP 1.5, it’s a huge upgrade.
Have a nice day!
Yeah, I’d love to upgrade, but as you can imagine with a live system including other plugins and 1000 hacks that is simply not possible.
I can’t spend my life upgrading and updating everyday, it comes a day when you want to see that project live, you know?
And back to the strings … yep, would have been nice though if they would have had different names, like %s, p%, x% whatever.
What I found more than weird with the emails is that ALL placeholders are actually … one. So no matter if you replace the name, the confirmation link, the friend name or group, they are always and everywhere called by the same %s. As an user … am I supposed to find any logic in this? Unfortunatelly not. and the only explanation that comes with the plugin is smth like “try to figure it out yourself”.
Therefore I do not understand complains about to many questions, or annoyed, fully puzzled users. As I said, a simple 1-2 paragraph explantion about how those emails were build would save everybody lots of precious time and nerves.
Wishing you a nice day too, and thanks for your answer 🙂
I don’t appreciate the tone of your first post, candy2012. Please assume that if I release a plugin, it will do what it says it does — with the exception that, like any software, there may be some small bugs. I’m aware of a few with Welcome Pack, for example, but haven’t had any time to investigate them for quite some time.
The %s and %d (and others) are tokens used by the printf series of functions, across many programming languages. For PHP’s documentation, check out http://uk3.php.net/manual/en/function.sprintf.php As angslycke says, they are used so that the code can figure out where to put certain phrases; in this case, names or keywords or links.
Replacing %s with %2$s or %d with %s, or adding addition symbols, will probably break the string replacement. This is obviously not a great situation, and is fragile, but it was shipped intentionally (otherwise it would have taken a long longer to get the version of the plugin out). To be honest, it has actually been a lot more robust than I originally envisaged.
Eventually, I want to have some sort of drag-and-drop replacement so you can drag in certain ‘blocks’ that are replaced with a name, or a link, or whatever pre-set piece of data it is. I do not believe I am able to practically do that until certain changes are made to the way BuddyPress (and perhaps WordPress) manages sending emails.
I think I have a ticket on the BuddyPress trac about this (http://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/), but I can’t find it quickly.
