This is the “reason” for the delay in the release of the E-commerce plugin in.
I have been working closely with Rich of www.cregy.co.uk to come up with a plugin that would allow many of his clients to receive correspondence through their Wordpress sites and to be able to act on that correspondence in a way that makes managing communication easy and swift.
This is the result: http://www.cregy.co.uk/crm-wp-plugin/
This plugin allows the admin to create any form of their choosing - without prior knowledge of HTML. If the admin knows how to fill out a form… then they can create forms!
To make responding to form submissions easier, there is the ability to assign each form submission to a category which the admin has previously created. Why though?
For an example:
- You run a web solutions company (original eh?)
- You have created a contact form that the user fills out to request more information about the various aspects of your business
- You don’t want to respond to EACH request individually (time is money!)
- You put each request into different categories: design, development, branding etc.
Now you can send one email to all the people who want to know about what is involved in “Branding”. Easy!
One email? Yup. The plugin provides an area for you to create email templates that can be used over and over again. Or, just to be used once. Whichever you need.
The email template system is, in my opinion, unique (to Wordpress anyway!). In that it allows you to “personalize” each mail that is sent while still only creating one email body. It does this by using placeholders. All of the fields within the form you created are made available for use within the template. Eg.:
“Dear [+first_name+] [+last_name+],
We received your mail on [+date+] requesting information about our [+web_solutions+].
yada yada yada.”
Where those placeholders ( all instances of [+ … +] ) represent fields that have been filled out by the user when submitting the form.
The email template system allows you to use html or plain text for your mail. The html option will include a plain text version for those email client that do not accept html. Still just one template… the html is stripped when the mail is sent.
It also allows you to specify how you want to send the mail: php mail() or smtp.
When it comes time to email all those people who have filled out a form, you can mass mail by choosing all those who will receive the same template…or you can mail one person.
Check it out! Rich has kindly made this plugin available for the Wordpress community.
http://www.cregy.co.uk/crm-wp-plugin/