I had to work on this for days and now I think it’s about time I release it. By following this tutorial, you will be able to receive free SMS alert every time someone comments on your site. This guide is specifically meant for WordPress sites, it could also be done on other sites but that’s up to you (we are not going to cover it)! The service that we are going to use for the purpose is still in its beta stage, so that is the reason why you are going to receive SMS for free (US & International SMS, both). And yes, you can be certain that the service won’t last long for free.

What we are basically going to do is create an RSS feed for pending comments on WordPress and use the service provided by a particular site, which would check our RSS feed regularly and send a SMS if it finds something new on the feed. Since there is no such plugin to make RSS feed for pending comments, I had to create one myself.

With no knowledge of PHP or WordPress editing, for that matter, I had to struggle for days to make a fully working plugin. Earlier, I had thought of making you guys upload the files manually, but again decided to make the plugin which would reduce the work done on your part so that it would be easier for you. Let’s get on with the tutorial.

First of all, we need to have some anti-spam measure on our site so that we don’t receive SMS for spam comments too. So, either install Akismet or any other plugins of similar kind. Akismet monitors your site for spam comments. This part is compulsory, do not skip it; install Akismet or any other similar plugins before moving on with the tutorial. It’s for your own good.

Now, install Feed for Pending Comments plugin on your site. You can either download it from WordPress plugin directory, or search for it through the Search Plugins section on your site.

Once installed, activate the plugin. You’ll be able to access the RSS feed for pending comments by going to www.yoursite.com/pencom-feed/

As of now, I have not added any option to change the URL for the RSS feed, you can only access it by going to /pencom-feed/

Now, every time a new comment passes Akismet spam check, it would be marked as Pending and would be listed on the RSS feed above. (You can test by un-approving some of the comments you already have, they’ll be listed on the RSS feed as soon as you un-approve them.)

The first part is over.

Next, register here for free.

Log in to the site once you are done registering.

Now, go here and click on Activate.

Enter your phone number (include the ’00’ and country code) and press on Send PIN. You should receive a PIN number in next few seconds/minutes. Enter that PIN on the PIN field of the site and press on Activate.

We are almost done. Now, go to this link and on the Feed URL field, type the link to your Pending comments Feed (i.e. yoursite.com/pencom-feed).

Press on Use Recipe.

Press on Check Now button once.

Done. Now, you’ll receive SMS every time someone comments on your site.

To test whether it works or not, un-approve one of the comments on your site and then press the Check Now button, you should receive an SMS immediately.

Note : According to IFTTT.com, the feed is checked every 15 minutes, so you won’t be receiving the SMS alert immediately. Also, I have noticed that some times it takes more than 15 minutes, i.e 30 minutes or even hours in some cases, for the feed to be checked.


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