How to Get Email Notifications for Posts Pending Review in WordPress

Would you like to get email notifications when authors submit posts for review on your WordPress site?

Managing multiple writers in a WordPress blog can be hectic. If you have a multi-author blog, then you might find it helpful to know when a writer submits a post for review.

In this article, we will show you how to get email notifications for posts pending review in WordPress.

Why Get Email Notifications for Posts Pending Review in WordPress?

When you first start your WordPress blog you’ll probably do everything yourself. You’ll come up with all the ideas for your content, write and proofread the posts, and publish them when they’re finished.

As your blog grows, you may get other writers involved in contributing to your blog. That can be a lot more work!

You’ll need to collaborate with them and keep them on track. You’ll have to become more deliberate when planning and scheduling your content. And you’ll have to review each article before you publish it.

There are plenty of ways you can improve the editorial process. One thing that really helps is to receive a notification when a post is pending review.

Without these notifications, you’ll have to constantly visit your blog’s dashboard to check up on the progress of each post.

You could set up email notifications for all post changes on WordPress, but with a busy multi-author blog, that may be too many emails.

Luckily, there is an excellent plugin that makes setting up more specific notifications easy.

PublishPress is the best plugin for multi-author WordPress blogs. It sends email notifications when a post’s status is changed in WordPress, along with adding tons of other features.

How to Get Email Notifications for Posts Pending Review in WordPress

The first thing you need to do is install and activate the PublishPress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Note: There is a paid version of PublishPress with more advanced features, but we will be using the free version in this tutorial.

Upon activation, a PublishPress section is added to your WordPress dashboard. To create a new notification you need to visit the PublishPress » Notifications page.

On this page, you will see the default notifications. These send emails to the site administrator when content is published and editorial comments are added to a post.

To create a new custom notification, you need to click on the ‘Add New’ button. Go ahead and type ‘Posts Pending Review’ in the title section.

Now we’ll turn our attention to the Workflow Settings. Here, you can select when to send a notification, the users who will get notified, and for which types of content.

We want a notification to be sent when the status of a post is changed to ‘Pending review’. So you need to click the ‘When the content is moved to a new status’ checkbox.

Once you’ve done that, select ‘Pending review’ from the New status dropdown menu.

Next, you need to let PublishPress know the types of content you want to send notifications for. So click the Post type checkbox and select ‘Posts’ from the dropdown menu.

If you also want notifications to be sent for other types of content, then you need to check ‘Pages’ as well.

The next thing you need to do is let the plugin know who to notify. If you’re the only person who should be notified, then you can just check the Site Administrator box.

If you have several editors, then it’s a little more complicated.

While you could individually select each user who needs to be notified, it’s simpler to notify everyone with the Editor user role instead. You can learn about assigning roles in our beginner’s guide on user roles and permissions.

To notify all your editors, click the Roles checkbox and select ‘Editor’ from the dropdown menu.

You might also like to check ‘Users who selected Notify me for the content’ since they’ll be expecting to receive notifications.

Note: By default, the author of the content and everyone who edited it will also receive notifications. You can change this in PublishPress’s settings.

Now it’s time to compose the contents of the email that will be sent. While the basic content will be the same each time, specific information like the post title and author will change with each email.

PublishPress offers a number of shortcodes that will automatically fill in the correct information for each post. You’ll see the list of available shortcodes in the Help box on the right of the screen.

Here are the shortcodes we’ll use in our email:

[psppno_post title] fills in the title of the post
[psppno_post display_name] fills in the author of the post
[psppno_post permalink] fills in the permalink to the post

First, you need to copy the line below and paste it into the Subject text box.

“[psppno_post title]” is ready for review

Then you need to copy the two paragraphs below and paste them into the Body text box.

This notification is to let you know the content “[psppno_post title]” is ready for review. The post was written by [psppno_post display_name].

The URL of the content is [psppno_post permalink]

The final step is to click the Publish button. This will save and activate the notification workflow.

Now you and your editors will be notified promptly whenever a post is ready for review.

How to Make Sure Your Emails Get Delivered

Unfortunately, many users who start out with a WordPress blog become frustrated with emails not arriving.

That might be because your WordPress hosting server isn’t properly configured to use the PHP mail() function. Or it could be because emails sent by WordPress are often identified as spam by email providers like Gmail.

Either way, it’s not good news if you rely on email for notifications.

That’s where WP Mail SMTP can help. It’s a WordPress plugin that makes sure your emails are delivered reliably.

To make sure your emails are delivered, you can followed our guide on how to fix WordPress emails not sending.

We hope this article helped you learn how to set up email notifications for posts pending review in WordPress.

You might also want to learn how to create a free business email address or see our comparison of the best HR payroll software for small business.

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