With the Job Alerts plugin, registered users on your site can create job alerts based on searches (by keyword, location keyword, category) delivered by email daily, weekly or fortnightly.
Note: the Job Manager Geolocation plugin adds Geolocation and Radius settings on the Alerts page and does not exist in the core WPJM plugin or any addons made by Automattic.
Installation
To install this plugin, please refer to the guide here: https://wordpress.org/support/article/managing-plugins/#installing-plugins
Setup
To get this plugin working, create a page and call it something like “My Alerts”. Inside the page content, add the shortcode:
[job_alerts]This will house the page where users set up and manage their alerts after becoming your site users.
Please note that it is not currently possible to allow unregistered or non-logged-in users to create Alerts, as an account is required to manage them.
Once you set up your page, you can head to Job Listings > Settings > Job Alerts to configure the plugin’s settings.
- Alert Email Content – This option controls the content of your alert emails. Emails are plain text.
- Alert Duration – Entering a number here will cause a user’s alerts to expire are X days. When expires, the user can log in to their alerts page to re-enable them for another X days.
- Alert matches – Enable this to ensure that an email is only sent if jobs are found that match your alert. If this is disabled, an email will be sent every time the alert is checked, even if there are no matches.
- Alerts Page ID – Select the page where you have placed the [job_alerts] shortcode so the add-on knows where to link users to view their alerts.
- Emails Permission Checkbox – Add a permission checkbox to the alert form, so the user can only create alerts after authorizing to receive emails.
Using Job Alerts
The job alerts page (which you set up above) will first show a blank table as no alerts are configured. Click ‘add alert’ to begin. This will show the add alert form:
When you’ve set up your alert, click ‘save’. It will then be activated and displayed in the table:
Alerts have the option to:
- Check the results
- Send the alert
- Edit the alert
- Disable the alert
- Delete the alert
Alerts can be moderated in admin by going to Job Listings > All alerts:
As for the specific fields you can choose from, alert_frequency can have the values daily, weekly, fortnightly, and monthly.
These can be further customized by using job_manager_alerts_alert_schedules filter – read more about that on the Job Alerts snippets page
How alerts are sent
Once an alert is created (or enabled) a WordPress cron event will be scheduled. When this event is triggered, the alert will be sent and another cron will be scheduled. This process will repeat while the alert is active.
Different Results when using Send Now vs scheduled emails
Only job listings created after the previous email schedule, will be included in the next email. This is to prevent sending the same job listing multiple times.
For example, if the alert is set to daily, and the last email was sent out on 1 January, only job listings created after 1 January will be included in the 2 January email.
This differs to using Send Now button in the Alerts page. The Send Now email will include all job listings that matches the filter, regardless of when the listings were posted.
Ensuring cron jobs are triggered for low traffic sites
WP Cron jobs are triggered when the site is visited by a user or bot. If you want cron jobs to trigger more often or more reliably, consider this tutorial for setting up a ‘real’ cron job.
Emails aren’t getting sent
Ensure WP cron is not disabled if you are not using ‘real cron’, as mentioned above. Check for this in your wp-config file:
define('DISABLE_WP_CRON', true);If you see that line, remove it, or set it to false..
Please also see our troubleshooting for email.
Wrong “from” email address
Alert emails are set up to be sent from “noreply@yourwebsite.com“ by default.
However, with some hosts, if this address doesn’t exist as a mail account on your server, then it may be replaced, so you will find alert emails being sent from an email address belonging to your hosting provider.
If this happens, you can fix it by creating a mail account with your host for “noreply@yourwebsite.com“
Customizing the Alerts Form
Please note that we cannot provide support for customizing this plugin.
Make sure to check out how to override templates.
The templates you can override for Job Alerts are:
../wp-job-manager-alerts/templates/alert-form.php, which is the form used when creating a new job listing alert.
../wp-job-manager-alerts/templates/content-email_job_listing.php, which generates the content used in the Alerts notification email.
../wp-job-manager-alerts/templates/my-alerts.php, which displays the job listing alerts, on the page containing the `[job_alerts]` shortcode.