Notify User When Submitted Post is Published

Last updated October 14, 2022 | Written by David Smith 10 Comments

January 31, 2020: Fixed issue where email was not sent due to formatting issue in code.

This handy snippet allows you to send an email notification to the user who submitted a Gravity Forms generated post when that post is published.

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This snippet assumes you have created a Post Custom Field which will store the submitting user’s email address. You would then specify the “Custom Field Name” you specified for the field as the $custom_field_name variable.

For example, assuming I had configured a Post Custom Field with the following settings:

Sample Post Custom Field settings configured as an email field

I would set the $custom_field_name variable like so:

$custom_field_name = 'author_email';

Lastly, don’t forget to set your basic email settings!

$from_name  = 'Your Name';
$from_email = 'your@email.com';
$subject    = 'Your Subject Here';
$message    = 'Your message here.';

This will only work for regular WordPress posts. If you’d like to apply to pages (or any custom post type), you’ll want to update the action from “publish_post” to “publish_{your_post_type}”.

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Comments

Shoeb says

December 9, 2017 at 2:47 pm

Is it only going to work for those who are logged in and registered member of the website?

Reply
- David Smith says
  
  December 12, 2017 at 7:57 am
  
  No, it will send the email to whatever email address is saved in the “author_email” custom field.
- Shoeb says
  
  December 12, 2017 at 8:20 am
  
  It doesn’t work for me though
- David Smith says
  
  December 12, 2017 at 8:33 am
  
  If you’re a Gravity Perks customer, we’ll be happy to provide additional support via the support form.
Vahid says

May 13, 2016 at 1:55 am

Hi David.

This snippet is not working and cause 500 error on my website.. I already added your snippets in functions.php and I add this code to theme functions.php too.

Regards, Vahid.

Reply
- David Smith says
  
  May 18, 2016 at 9:57 am
  
  Hi Vahid, these troubleshooting tips might help: https://gravitywiz.com/documentation/snippet-troubleshooting/
Jeph says

October 22, 2015 at 2:09 pm

Is there a way to make the message HTML? How do you include the post URL in the message?

Reply
- David Smith says
  
  October 23, 2015 at 8:19 am
  
  Hi Jeph, you can include HTML in the message like so:
  
  $message = '
  
  Hello!
  
  This is a message.
  
  ';
  
  You can include a link to the post like so:
  
  $message = 'View your post here: View Post';
- Jeph says
  
  October 26, 2015 at 11:05 am
  
  Thanks David! I’ve been trying to play around adding other custom fields from the form, but I can’t quite figure it out? How would I include the post title and another field from the form?
- David Smith says
  
  October 26, 2015 at 9:05 pm
  
  You can get the post title like so:
  
  $post_title = get_the_title( $post_id );
  
  The entry bit is more complicated.
  
  $entry = GFAPI::get_entry( get_post_meta( $post_id, '_gform-entry-id', true ) ); $my_value = $entry[3];
  
  Replace the “3” with the field ID you want to retrieve the data from.

Comments