Question

This deals with WordPress plugin development. Even if a user has not actually signed into WordPress, but has left a comment, WordPress remembers them from the last time. I wanted to toggle showing a “Subscribe To Newsletter” checkbox if they had already subscribed previously to a newsletter. I’ve already worked out the checkbox and it writes to another table storing the comment author’s email when they post. But what is difficult is that I want to not show the checkbox if the user has already subscribed. It’s easy enough to not show the checkbox if I had an actual email address, but I don’t know how to retrieve the email address simply when the comment form is shown.

Note, using get_currentuserinfo() does not apply here because the user is a commentor, not a blog article admin or author.

I need something where the user comes to a post they have not yet commented on. They may have commented on other posts, just not this one. In WordPress, you’ll notice that it automatically knows this and assigns a Name and Mail field value through cookies.

Answer 1

Here’s a routine I have worked out, but perhaps you can do it better through something in the WordPress codex?

function getCommentAuthorEmail() {
global $user_level;

  get_currentuserinfo();
  if($user_level > 0) { //if signed into wordpress as admin or author
    return ''; //don't provide anything
  }

  $sEmail = '';
  try {
    foreach($_COOKIE as $sKey => $sVal) {
      if (strpos(' ' . $sKey, 'comment_author_email')>0) {
        $sEmail = urldecode($sVal);
        break;
      }
    }
  } catch (Exception $e){}
  return $sEmail;
}