No Idea how to set it up – confusing documentation

  • Dave333

    (@dave333)


    11 years, 4 months ago

    The author says it works without any configuration. That is not the experience I had. There are pages of settings and seems overly complicated. I struggled with it for over an hour and couldn’t get it set up.

    The instructions were riddled with spelling errors (was the author too lazy to run a spell check???), were incomplete and confusing.

    Maybe it works, I don’t know. As with so many plugins, all the effort put in to building the plugin is wasted as the lack of supporting documentation renders it unusable for most users who are not programmers or plugin developers.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Author Stefano Lissa

    (@satollo)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    Hi Dave, thank you for your message. Yes getting a look to all Newsletter configurations they are too much to set for a first installation, this is why all configuration are preset to default values. So as written (in my bad English – but that is all I have) on welcome panel the only thing to to is to install a widget.

    Clearly some improvements can be made for first time users and on every update I’ll try to improve the administration side to be more and more user friendly. On the other side, a newsletter system is complex by nature and it cannot have just three options, even professional mail marketing system ($$$) have complex panels. 🙂

    Anyway, if you would sent me first usage impressions they’ll be useful to improve the plugin. An example is this: “the first I entered the administrative side I was looking for … and I searched for it on panel … while it was on panel …”.

    Thank you, Stefano.

    Thread Starter Dave333

    (@dave333)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    Thanks Stefano,

    I’m happy to describe my first impressions and difficulties experienced.

    The first thing I did was go to the first tab, Welcome & Support, to read about how to set it up. The First Step says:

    Newsletter works out of box. You don’t need to create lists or evenly configure it. Just use your WordPress appearance panel, enter the widgets panel and ass (typo) the Newsletter widget.

    The spelling error in the first step raised a bit of a red flag, making me wonder if the rest of the documentation was going to lack attention to detail.

    I added the widget to my sidebar but all I got was a small round grey image. I wasn’t sure if I had missed something in the very basic instructions so I went and read the first step again. I wondered again about the lack of attention to detail and thought perhaps you had accidentally omitted some of the instructions.

    I then went back to the widget and read the details on the widget:

    The subscription form is created according the subscription panel configurations and appended at the end of the introduction text. If you want to place the form in the middle of introduction text above, use the {subscription_form} tag.

    So I added {subscription_form} into the description, thinking perhaps this was required in addition to the instructions under the First Step.

    At this point I was confused but sure I had done as instructed but didn’t understand why it wasn’t working.

    It turned out that the small grey image that the widget created on my sidebar was the Subscribe button. I found the setting on one of the many pages that allowed you to add text to the button, and a blank box to enter your email address. However, I have just gone through all the pages in the settings of the plugin twice and I can’t find those settings again.

    I suggest that you don’t claim that it works out of the box by simply adding the widget to the sidebar. Even if I were able to do that and get a Subscribe button and a box for the user to enter their email address, I would still need to create a newsletter and configure the other settings for the subscription to actually mean anything.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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