This extension will transform your Vanilla whisper system into the more commonly-known "Private Messages" system. It uses the whisper system, so you'll have to enable that if you haven't done already! Also, you'll need to create a new category where all whispers will be saved to. This category should not be accesably by any role as it will be used internally.

Download: Private Messages 1.1









TO DO
- Send messages to multiple receipients
- Option to disable "old-style" whispering
- New message notification

ouch.. didn't test it with Friendly users :) Will look into this!

And even one more, without friendly urls! ;-)

If I try to answer a message I'm getting an error, telling me, I have to enter the person I whisper to! Strange!

Well played Jazzman, I look forward to it working with Friendlies :) (shouldn't that be part of the Core?)

@Jazzman:
Thank you! Great work!

@Circuit:

I'm using that allready, but I think it would be nice to have the possibility to send a *private message* direkt from the profile...

Tiggr

also: it would be nice to create links in this format:

.../extension.php?PostBackAction=PrivateMessages&View=SendMessage&WhisperUsername=username

so i could have links on my WordPress blog that point to the 'send a message' screen in vanilla.

Hey Jazzman - great idea for an add-on, many forum users expect this functionality now I think, so it's very useful.

Just to say, there's a conflict between the "Latest Topics" add-on and this "Private message" add-on. "Private message" appears under the "Latest Topics" heading when this add-on is enabled, but broswing to it produces the standard error message:


Some problems were encountered
The requested discussion could not be found.
The requested discussion could not be found.


Also I think that the context in which most PMs are sent is in response to posts in a category. So changing "whisper" to "send private message" or "send PM" is a good idea. Users will get confused if both terms are used and will not use the feature if they aren't sure.

Great add-on though. Hope you have time to use this feedback!

more comments from my forum users:

1. in the 'sent' items' box, you see the username of the person you sent your PM to. in the inbox, you see the username of the person that started the whisper exchange, which could be your own username. the inbox should always show the other user's name. otherwise it could be really hard to distinguish between messages.

2. if you send a new PM, it appears in your inbox as an unread item. this is confusing people as they think they have a new message when they don't.

3. the extension still appears to work with whispers turned off which is good news as it is less confusing for people! however, in IE, i have no sent items appearing in the sent box, even though they are sent OK. in firefox, i have messages in the outbox but no usernames attached to them. still, maybe this is a good sign that the extension could be easily adapted for people who wanted whispers to be disabled.

4. i have, with wallphone's help, added the following to the top of the file:

$SendTo = $_GET['SendTo'];
$Discussion->WhisperUsername = $SendTo; // or use urldecode(ForceIncomingString('SendTo', ''));

this allows me to pass &SendTo=Username in the url, although it needs a bit more work so it doesn't throw up an error if &SendTo is not there. it might be nice if this were included in the next version.

5. lots of requests for either email notification or an unread message count in the tab.


thanks again for your work, jazzman. this is the most requested feature in my forum, and the most important plugin, which is why i am so vocal about it :)

awesome -

not sure if this has been mentioned but notification of new PMs like new whispers would be great. doesn't seem to happen on mine.

also, the inbox tab in the diagram you have shows a (1) after the word inbox, which is also an indicator but also doesn't seem to happen on mine either.

cheers !

thank you jazzman!!
it works brilliantly.

is there a way to turn on email notification for all users as the default? (is it a database setting?)

I get the following...

The error occurred on or near: You have an error in
your SQL syntax near 'on t.FirstCommentID =
m.CommentID where t.Active = '1' and t.CategoryID =
'5'' at line 1

i don't think the forum is sending out notification emails... i am not getting any. (the notify plugin works fine)

additionally, in the next release, could there be a way for users to delete messages?

@circuit: you'll have to enable email notification. Check your "Forum Preferences" from the "Account" page. Also.. strange that your send messages are marked unread... what steps do you take to write this message?

oh, regarding sent messages - i just compose and send a PM in the normal way and it appears in my inbox AND sent items as an unread message... i will experiment more with it when i next send a PM.

yes...

There are only two things that would make this the perfect system as far as I'm concerned.

1. The ability to delete messages that you've read. Not auto delete though.
2. An indicator on the "Inbox" tab that tells you that you have a new message: *ex. Inbox (1)*

I never do email notifications for stuff like this but I guess a part 3 would be the email notify for those that do.

Just my $.02

hmm by reading these posts i guess i will wait for a couple more releases to be released before i decide to add this to my forum.

The new message indicator is on my list, but I haven't been able to create a good sql query to retrieve the number of new messages.

@shotoshi: You can always email me so I can concider it, but lately I've been very busy with my real job :)

jazzman, could you perhaps add a notification above the discussions which tells you when you have new messages?
notification emails are only being sent when PMs are replied to, not when a new PM is sent.

Jazzman,
This is a great add-on. Nice work.

But, I noticed two things which are somewhat buggy/confusing:

1) If you send a message — and even if you get a reply — it doesn't count towards the message count in your inbox. You can even see this in your example screenshot (taken from above):

If you look closely, you'll see the message count says "1 to 3 of 3" even though there are clearly 5 rows of messages.



And, not only does an incoming reply to your sent messages not count towards the inbox message count, if that's all you have in your inbox, it will still tell you don't have any mail — even though it should.

2) If you reply to someone who sent you the original private message, it doesn't show up in your outbox. It only shows up in your inbox. That would be acceptable if the inbox behaved similarly, but it doesn't — the inbox seems to show sent messages to others even if no one has replied to them yet.

*bump*

any fix for that?

Hey guys! Sorry, I was away for the past two weeks. I'll pick up this extension very soon :)

hmm, it didn't create a tab at the top on mine. Could there be a conflict with the Page Management extension?

A notification on the message board of a private message is needed.

another bug (i think).
when composing a private message, the WYSIWYG toolbar does not appear, even though i have the option of selecting text or BBcode.

i feel it would make more sense if the 'x days ago' (or minutes, or whatever) text reflected the time of the last message in the exchange, and not the first one.
does anyone else agree?

at the moment, if i receive a new PM in reply to another, it still says '4 days old' next to it, even though the newest message is only 5 minutes old.