This plugin hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Keep in Touch

Description

Offers a widget that enables visitors to subscribe for receiving by email a weekly digest
of newly added posts. This keeps the users closer to your site and doesn’t force them to
“poll” for updates.

The widget only shows an input field for the email address and a ‘Subscribe’ button.
Then a short procedure is started to confirm the subscription:

  • No validation is performed on the entered email address.

  • After clicking on ‘Subscribe’, the user is presented a virtual page in which she is
    asked to re-enter the email address and click again on a ‘Subscribe’ button.
    This is a simple measure against robots placing subscription requests.

  • Again, no validation is performed on the entered email address except it is matched with
    the one previously entered. In case of a match, an email message is sent to the user
    containing a link with a unique code, on which the user has to click to confirm her
    request. The user is informed by this in a new virtual page.

  • After the user clicks on the link in the email, the email address is considered
    subscribed and it will receive weekly messages containing a digest of new posts from the
    previous week, with direct links to the respective pages. In each message there is also
    a link to allow the user to unsubscribe.

Unsubscribing follows a similar pattern in which the user will first receive an email to
confirm the request, with a link containing a unique code.

To keep it simple, no check is performed as to whether a user is already registered or
not. Any request can be performed in any phase of the process.

Weekly emails are sent using wp_mail(), on a configurable weekday at a configurable time.
Even when no posts have been added, the user will still receive and email to inform her of
that.

The emails will all contain the heading image of the theme at the top.

Until support is provided for selecting subscriptions, all subscribers will be subscribed
for the weekly digest and the newsletter.

Warning!

Only tested with the permalink format set as
“/index.php/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/” on a Windows server. Don’t know if it
works with other formats, although the implementation is quite generic.

Options page

The plugin registers an option page that enables admins to:

  • configure the weekday and time-of-day when the digests are sent
  • (re)send the digest(s) to subscribers or to given email addresses
  • send a newsletter to subscribers or to given email addresses

Wishlist

Some features to be added in some future version:

  • Daily and maybe monthly digest.
  • Timed removal of unconfirmed requests.
  • Configurable messages and format(s) of digest(s)
  • Support for selecting subscription options (digest, newsletter)

Installation

  1. Download the zip file, and use WordPress’ plugin installation page in the dashboard
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Place the shortcode(s) you need in your post

Reviews

Read all 1 review

Contributors & Developers

“Keep in Touch” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Translate “Keep in Touch” into your language.

Interested in development?

Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.

Changelog

1.3

  • Removed my own e-mail address from the plugin; was left in there after debugging.

1.2

  • Added option to control whether a message is sent when there are no new articles ; also the message is now configurable
  • A bit of reorganization in handling of virtual page url; some experimenting with google recaptcha
  • Changed weekly digest query
  • Changed class Virtual_Page to accept a list of posts
  • Added people, author, member taxonomies and list pages
  • Fix class name for shortcodes
  • Finalized settings page for people list management
  • Moved settings menu entry ; send updates only on new article
  • Some fixes for the settings page
  • Added options reader class and made schedules recurrent
  • Fixed initial database creation issue and registration without name issue
  • Added people, author, member taxonomies and list pages

1.1

  • Sanitized text inputs
  • Added e-mail notifications to site administrators on subscription failures and successes
  • Changed terminology in the Italian translation
  • Added configurable successful subscription message (more to come hopefully)
  • Added the option to request the name of the subscribers
  • Reorganized code to make it more coherent

1.0.7

  • Updated the version number

1.0.6

  • Added option to set path to header image

1.0.5

  • Fixed hardcoded path to admin_url. Thanks to msorin for reporting it.

1.0.4

  • Added RSS icon to access the posts feed

1.0.3

  • Added styles to digest messages to show the list as a table

1.0.2

  • Fixed escaped quotes in urls to media in newsletter

1.0.1

  • Small readme change

1.0.0

  • First release