Get WordPress Notifications as a Daily or Weekly Digest

photo credit: Jan Vašek

One of the most persistent underlying causes of stress in the digital age is the feeling of drowning in communication. Nearly every Monday on Twitter begins with a litany of complaints from friends about the sheer volume of email that is waiting to be answered. Notifications for all the apps that were supposed to make our lives easier have piled up and the pressure to be “always on” suffocates any spark of creative thinking.

If you want to keep a clean inbox, you have to be very intentional about managing and consolidating as many email notifications as possible. Fortunately for WordPress site owners there’s a new plugin that will help keep your website from becoming part of the problem.

Pascal Birchler and the folks at required+ have just released Digest Notifications, a plugin that aggregates your notifications into one manageable digest. Its settings panel allows you to set the frequency to either daily or weekly at a set time of day. This allows users to limit these notifications to work hours, if so desired.

The digest consolidates the following events into one email:

New Core Updates

New comments that need to be moderated (depending on your settings under ‘Settings’ -> ‘Discussion’)

New user sign-ups

Password resets by users

Here’s what an example digest email might look like:

The plugin is also extensible and includes a number of well documented hooks that developers can use to add to the digest queue and modify the email message.

Depending on how active your site is, the plugin may not make a huge dent in your email load but it can help to keep WordPress from becoming part of your email problem. If you have an active blog with a global readership, then you are likely getting dozens of comment moderation emails throughout the day and night. New user signups can also quickly flood your inbox during times of peak activity.

Not all notifications are so imperative that you need to receive them by email immediately but you probably don’t want to turn them off entirely either. This plugin offers you a happy medium. If you’re struggling to stay afloat in your inbox and WordPress-generated emails are piling up, install Digest Notifications to stay in the loop while keeping emails to a minimum.