Adding Print and E-Mail Features

If you’re just tuning in, this is the sixth installment of my series of articles about using WordPress as a CMS to build an informational Web site. Throughout this series, I’m talking about a specific site I developed: Flying M Air, a helicopter tour and charter company I operate when I’m not writing and tweaking my Web sites.

Because Flying M Air’s Web site was designed to be a sort of “online brochure” for my company’s services, I wanted the site’s visitors to be able to print information right from the site’s pages. Unfortunately, printing a WordPress blog page doesn’t seem to come out as pretty as it does on the site. Try it for yourself and see.

Although I could create PDF brochures for every tour and charter, it would be a royal pain in the you-know-what to recreate these documents every time I had a price change. To make matters worse, there was no way to force visitors to download the nicely formatted brochures instead of simply using their browser’s Print command to print what they saw in the browser window.

Clearly, I needed a better solution.

As usual, a plugin already existed to do the job: WP-Print by GaMerZ (AKA, Lester Chan). This plugin enables you to include a Print link or icon within The Loop for each post. When a user clicks the link or icon, the plugin generates a printer friendly page.

WP-Print is pretty easy to use. Just drop the plugin’s print folder into your plugins folder, go into the Plugins Management Administration Panel, and activate the WP-Print plugin.

Next, configure the plugin in the Print Options administration panel (Options > Print). You use the drop-down lists to indicate whether you want the user to be able to print comments, links, and/or images. I turned off images because they looked ugly with the yellow border around them. Click Update Options. You’re almost done.

Open the template file that includes The Loop and insert the following code where you want the Print link to appear:

<?php if(function_exists('wp_print')) { print_link(); } ?>

If you prefer a print icon like I have, no problem. Use this code instead:

<?php if(function_exists('wp_print')) { print_link_image(); } ?>

A word here about the Print icon that comes with WP-Print. It assumes you have a white background. I don’t. So I had to create my own little print icon. (I did the same for the e-mail icon, which I discuss later.) If you have to go this route, make it roughly the same size and give it the same name as the Print icon that comes with WP-Print and stick it in plugins/print/images/ to replace the existing icon.

If your theme uses The Loop in more than one place, you need to insert this code wherever you want the Print link or button to appear. For example, in my theme (Andreas), I had to insert it in index.php, archive.php, and single.php. I could have stuck it in page.php, too, but I didn’t need to, for reasons I’ll discuss in another installment of this series. In my aneclecticmind.com site, which uses the Exquisite theme, I just had to stick it in the post.php file, which is called by all other files that need to display posts. A much nicer solution, if you ask me.

While I was adding plugins and code, I figured I may as well add an e-mail feature. GaMerZ has one of those, too: WP-Email. This plugin enables you to put an E-mail link or button in The Loop for each post. Clicking the link or button displays a form the visitor can use to e-mail the post’s contents to someone else — or himself.

As you might expect, the plugin installs the same way. Put the email folder in the plugins folder and activate the plugin in the Plugin Management administration panel.

Configure the plugin in the E-Mail Options window (E-mail > E-Mail Options). I won’t show them here because they’re too big to display on this page, but they’re pretty self-explanitory. You can get more information in the documentation. Just make sure you select PHP for the Method Used To Send E-Mail if you’re not using an SMTP server.

Of course, when I installed it, I skipped the configuration step, which caused me to do a whole bunch of other work…more on that in a moment.

Now open the template file that includes The Loop and insert the following code where you want the E-mail link to appear:

<?php if(function_exists('wp-email')) { e-mail_link(); } ?>

If you prefer a e-mail icon like I have, no problem. Use this code instead:

<?php if(function_exists('wp-email')) { email_link_image(); } ?>

Remember, I modified the e-mail icon so it would have that silly yellow background that appears on my site.

Now here’s where I screwed up — and only because I didn’t follow the instructions. I went onto the site and clicked the E-mail button for a post. A form like the one shown here appeared. The only problem was, there was no image in the Image Verification area. Why? Because the version of PHP I was using didn’t support captcha.

If I’d followed the instructions, I would have seen that that feature could be disabled. But I didn’t see the configuration options at all. So I did things the hard way. I upgraded PHP. And let me tell you, it was a scary thing to do. I actually lost all my blogs for about 10 minutes. Then I figured out how to get them back and everything is working fine. As an added bonus, I can now use the captcha feature in Spam Karma, which has cut my comment moderation work down to zilch.

Of course, I soon realized that I could only send one message every few minutes, which made testing tough. I found the configuration options and after slapping myself on the side of the head, adjusted the settings to give the new feature a good testing.

The moral of this story is RTFM — read the FABULOUS manual. (Gotta keep this site PG rated.)

While I’m discussing The Loop (kind of), I want to mention that I disabled the display of comments (and even comments links) in the Loop. I did this by commenting out the php comments_popup_link tag. I could have deleted it, but I was worried that I might need it someday and not be able to enter it back correctly. I already disabled comments and trackbacks in all posts and pages by setting defaults (as we discuss in our WordPress book).

Why did I do this? Remember, this blog is being used as a CMS. Although I could have left posts open for comments, I didn’t want to deal with Comment spam or have site visitors ask questions using the Comments feature. Visitors on the site are able to contact me using a contact form — that’s something we cover in our book so I won’t be discussing it in detail in this series.

In the next installment of this series, I’ll tell you about the site’s static Home page and the trick I used to get it to appear without a heading. Tune in next week!