WordPress, Comments, and E-mail

| April 25, 2012

Another problem specific to GoDaddy-hosted sites: when sending e-mail from your site, you must use a GoDaddy-hosted domain name as the from e-mail address. For example, if a user on your site, foobar.com, submits a form and you want to send a confirmation message back to them, the from address must be someusername@foobar.com. It can’t be someusername@gmail.com, someusername@yahoo.com, etc. Plus, you want to use relay-hosting.secureserver.net as the SMTP host and not smtpout.secureserver.net. There’s a WordPress plugin that helps fix this shortcoming: WP Mail SMTP, and its is detailed in this nice article.

The reason why I want to enable e-mail from my site is that I’d like commenters to receive a notification e-mail when someone has replied to their comment, a standard feature in many blogs. Unfortunately this is not a standard feature built-in to WordPress, but there’s another plug-in called Comment Reply Notification that seems to do the job.

Eventually, I’d like to enable Facebook comments on the site.

Update: I’ve enabled Facebook comments on the website, mostly to combat the increasing amount of spam comments I’ve been getting. I’m using the Facebook Comments Plugin by Alex Moss. Be sure to use this one; there are others with the words Facebook Comments in their name. This one is really easy to setup and configure. For the most part, you can accept the defaults. The only thing you need to input is the API ID that you need to get from Facebook at this link (make sure you’re logged into Facebook). Click on the +Create New App button in the upper right corner of that page to and fill in the blanks to get a new App ID/API Key, that you will then put into the plug-in’s setting.

If you want to close all of your existing posts to the traditional WordPress comments, see here.

If you see the message “URL is Unreachable” message in the Facebook comments section of your posts, then you want to do what it says here.