WordPress Plugin Of The Week: Comment Relish

This week’s featured WordPress plugin is Comment Relish by Justin Shattuck. Comment Relish is a genius plugin that sends an automated email to anyone who leaves their first comment on your blog.

I first came across Comment Relish when I left a comment on Jamie Harrop’s blog and a few minutes later receive what appeared to be a personalized email from Jamie thanking me for visiting his site.

Using the simple admin panel shown below you can construct a simple “Thank you” email or a more elaborate response to your first time commentators to drive them back to your site or convince them to subscribe to your RSS feed.

Comment Relish - Admin Panel

You can expand on your email message with Comment Relish by using some of the following tags:

%AUTHOR% – Author’s Name
%AUTHOR_URL% – Author’s Website
%AUTHOR_EMAIL% – Author’s Email
%COMMENT% – Comment Posted
%ARTICLE% – URL to Article
%COMMENT_ID% – Comment’s ID
%FEED_RSS2.0% – Website’s RSS 2.0 Feed URL
%DATE_SHORT% – Short date (eg: 5/25/2006)
%DATE_LONG% – Long date (eg: May 25th, 2006)
%DATETIME_SHORT% – Short datetime (eg: 5/25/2006 10:58:35AM)
%DATETIME_LONG% – Long datetime (eg: May 25th, 2006 10:58:35AM)

If you know of a WordPress plugin I might like to feature on the site please contact me.

January 13th, 2008 | WordPress | 4 Comments

4 Comments

  1. Thanks for the heads-up on this plugin. My blog is pretty low traffic and hardly anyone leaves comments but as i’m trying to build a community this may help

    Comment by Saif — January 15, 2008 @ 5:51 pm

  2. Ah, this is the recent for all the emails I get. Hope ya don’t have it installed! :twisted:

    Seriously though, it’s a pretty cool plugin. Might use it to give a not-so-slight reminder to newbies to TUK :)

    Comment by The University Kid — January 16, 2008 @ 1:40 am

  3. I had this plugin enabled for awhile but took it down; I feel it is rather impersonal. Now if someone takes the time to get involved in my site (repeat commenters), I’ll send a real email to them thanking them.

    Comment by Critical Critic — January 17, 2008 @ 6:42 am

  4. I appreciate the “plugin of the week” mention. I’m currently working on a new version which allows you to send multiple messages from an array, etc.

    Thanks again!

    Justin Shattuck’s last blog post..Apple sent me a lemon Macbook Air

    Comment by Justin Shattuck — March 22, 2008 @ 8:18 pm

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