Version 1.0 (updated 11 Feb 09)
Requires: WordPress 2.6 (could work with lesser)
Tested up to : WordPress 2.7b3

This plugin is no longer supported, please download TwitterLink-Comments which will do a much better job and will still be able to use the existing database table and labels.

Download TwitterLink Comments

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I had to do some playing around with my wordpress database when I wanted to move my install from a shared hosting to a dedicated server (which turned out to be quite easy!) and I went in a bit further to phpmyadmin to see what other things I could do.

With the current release of my new contest game, Aqua Craft, I wanted to let everyone that has visited here know about it and rather than wait for every single commenter to come back and see the post, I thought it might be easier to extract the email addresses of all commenters from the database and send them all a message. (luckily, only one person replied saying it was spam!).

I checked my wp_comments table and it had a few thousand entries, yey! I thought. I’ll send them all a message! I extracted the table into a csv file and was disappointed to see literally hundreds and hundreds of spammer email addresses in there…

Not being a mysql database geek, I did some searching and found a way to extract all the addresses of the commenters that had been approved… here’s how…

1.) Log in to phpmyadmin
2.) select the wp_comments table on the left and click the “browse” button on comment_author_email

3.) Click “edit” on the mysql statment at the top of the page and change it to the following

SELECT * FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` = ’1′

That will show you a list of all the comments made that have been approved.

4.) Click on the “export” tab and select these options..

This will give you a large .csv file ready to be opened by Excel

5.) Open the file in excel which will give you this..

This is a lot more than we need, so delete the columns for comment id, comment content etc so you’re left with comment_author, comment_author_email and comment_author_url

6.) Your excel file should look like this…

Now there will be a lot of duplicate email addresses from multiple commenters but if you have a decent newsletter or mass email program, you should be able to import this file and let it filter out all the dupes and discard the trackbacks and pings.

Easy peasy! I ended up with a few hundred email addresses who I could tell about my latest contest.. awesome…

Here are a couple of plugins that have really saved me some time since I installed them.

1. One Click Install

Install and update plugins and themes with one click of the mouse.

2. Absolute Comments

Reply to comments directly from the dashboard or email.

The first one, One Click Install, is a great little plugin that works with a Firefox extension enabling you to install a plugin or theme by right clicking a link to it’s zip file.

I didn’t install it at first because I felt I had enough plugins already but, this is especially useful for updating plugins from within the WP dashboard. Whenever I saw a plugin that needed updating on the plugins page I would make a mental note to visit the plugins’ page, download the zip file, extract it to my hard drive, upload it with ftp and finally check that it shows as activated on the plugins page.

9 times out of 10 I would forget the mental note until such a time where I would be missing one tool required for the update process (at work or on the road). Now it’s a simple process, to get started install the plugin and the OneClick Install Firefox Plugin. Do the Firefox restart that is required after installing an add on and then visit your WordPress plugin page to activate the One Click Install plugin.
Next, visit the admin page for the plugin at Dashboard/One Click Install

And look at the bottom of the page for your oneclickURL

Paste it into your Firefox addon by visiting Tools/Addons/ and selecting the Oneclick Installer for WordPress addon ‘options’ button.

And you’re ready to install any updates to plugins that you have. Visit your dashboard and check the plugins page for any that need updates (WP2.3 and up)..

You can see the message saying “There is a new version of..” and a link to the official WordPress plugins page, click that and you get to the plugin’s page at WordPress.org.

Then just right click the Download Plugin button and choose to install as plugin..

As long as you’re logged in to your WordPress, you will be taken to the Oneclick page and informed that your plugin was installed successfully.

Yey! note: you don’t actually have to use the Firefox addon, you can just paste the zip file URL into the box on the plugin admin page and install it from there or upload a zip file from your computer by clicking the ‘browse’ button and selecting it that way.

Very useful! Nice one Anirudh, thanks for a truly useful plugin.

The other plugin to save time especially if you get a lot of comments on your blog is the Absolute Comments plugin. I really like this one because it allows you to reply to comments directly from the comments page of the dashboard. No more do I need to visit each individual post to reply to comments! You can even reply from a comment notification. I haven’t used this part though as I have always got access to the dashboard if I have access to my email.

Just click on ‘reply’ from within the comments dashboard page..