Images not being delivered

  • RadiantFreedom

    (@radiantfreedom)


    5 years, 1 month ago

    I have a client with a newsletter set to send every Thrusday, and up until the last mailing, the newsletter was showing the featured images. In the last newsletter, none of the featured images were displayed, with their alt text showing up instead, and now, in testing using the autoresponder’s previewing options, I’m still just seeing the alt text where the images should be.

    The autoresponder is Mailchimp, and I have confirmed the *|FEEDITEM:IMAGE|* code is still properly in place. I also installed a feedreader extension to view the rss feed in my browser and can confirm the images are still in the RSS feed, so I don’t know what’s going wrong, but somehow the images are reaching the feed but not Mailchimp. Does anyone have any ideas what’s going wrong here?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Robin Cornett

    (@littlerchicken)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    This plugin modifies/adds images directly to the RSS feed content, and doesn’t add media tags, which is what the Mailchimp image merge tag is looking for. The easiest way to get the full content with images is to make sure your email template is using the *|FEEDITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* merge tag (or *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* if you are using those merge tags instead), which will pull in the content of your feed with the HTML markup. Since your feed is set to show summaries only, *|FEEDITEM:CONTENT|* should work as well–my guess is that the email template is using one of the *_TEXT merge tags, which are both plain text options.

    I’ve put your feed URL into a test campaign in Mailchimp and the image is showing properly with the full content tag. Hope that helps–

    Thread Starter RadiantFreedom

    (@radiantfreedom)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    I appreciate your help, but re-read this part:

    up until the last mailing, the newsletter was showing the featured images. In the last newsletter, none of the featured images were displayed,

    So, what I’m trying to figure out is why code that was working fine up until 8 days ago is suddenly not working now.

    I’d already tried the other methods and they failed to produce any images at all. Feeditem:Content just pulls out the title in all my tests, including one I just did now. Anything that pulls the images just give only alt text. Other methods weren’t giving me the layout my client wanted for these emails, so I had to pull the contents 1 piece at a time so I could get them placed correctly.

    Right now I’m trying to figure out where this error is coming from. I already know it’s not from the RSS feed itself, as the feature images, titles and summaries all appear as they should there, when I view it through a feed reader plugin in Firefox.

    So the best theory I have at the moment is there’s either a problem with how the feed’s being delivered to Mailchimp for email delivery, which is preventing the image files from being delivered, so that only the alt text can display – or there’s an issue with Mailchimp itself not correctly pulling contents out of the rss feed.

    Plugin Author Robin Cornett

    (@littlerchicken)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    You are correct that the RSS feed is fine. My guess is that there was another plugin or code in place which was, until 8 days ago, adding the media tag to your RSS feed, so the feed image tag was working. That media tag is no longer present in your feed, and this plugin doesn’t use or add it, so that suggests to me that the template is not pulling the HTML for the feed. The *|FEEDITEM:IMAGE|* tag will not work with this plugin alone.

    This is the email template I start with for testing. I’ve tested your feed with it and I get the post summary with an image, so this template works.

    You might try modifying your template to use these merge tags and then modify from there. Your post indicates that you have been using different merge tags provided by Mailchimp–I don’t know if changing them will make a difference, but I do know the ones I use are working with your feed.

    If that doesn’t work, can you share what you are using for your email template and I can check it directly?

    Thread Starter RadiantFreedom

    (@radiantfreedom)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    Tried that code and I still only get alt text. I did a check and the html tags are correctly pointing to the image, I can view it by doing a right click -> view image and see the thumbnail that should be displayed in the emails, so from a pure html standpoint, I can see no reason why the images are not displaying. the mailchimp rss codes seem to be pulling the images correctly, but for some reason the image does not display in any browser.

    Anyways, here’s the code I’m using:

    *|FEEDBLOCK:https://www.theafronews.com/feed/|* *|FEEDITEMS:[$count=1, $constrain_rss_img=Y, $category=Events]|*
*|FEEDITEM:TITLE|*
*|FEEDITEM:IMAGE|* *|FEEDITEM:CONTENT|* *|END:FEEDITEMS|* *|END:FEEDBLOCK|*

Test - Feeditem content
*|RSSITEMS:https://www.theafronews.com/feed/|*
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|*
Read in browser »
*|END:RSSITEMS|*

    The part after the “test” line is where I tested your code to see if that would work.

    This Week's News: *|RSSITEMS:|*
*|RSSITEM:TITLE|*
*|RSSITEM:CONTENT|*
Read on »
*|END:RSSITEMS|*

    EDIT: In case a lack of media tags in causing this issue, do you know any good plugins that add those in? Searching neither Google nor the wordpress plugins in the add plugins tool were helpful, nothing remotely close to that was coming up in the results.

    EDIT2: I did some more testing and what appears to be going on is the images exist on the server, and the html tags correctly point to the images, which are being feed in to both the RSS feed and mailchimp correctly up to a certain point, but when it comes time to load the images in the browser, this fails. Doing an Inspect element, I see the message “could not load image” when hovering over the “src” attrbute, so the alt text loads instead.

    I use WordFence and was able to rule out any recent changes to the firewall as being the culprit as I temporarily disabled the firewall, ran the test in mailchimp again and got the same results.

    EDIT3: I tried testing this feed using Aweber and got the same results, no images display, just alt text. So the feed’s images seem to be there, but something either within the server, browser or WordPress is preventing the images from displaying.

    Plugin Author Robin Cornett

    (@littlerchicken)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    I’ve copied your code into an RSS email and a standard campaign and the image is showing properly for me (the feedblock merge tags work in both campaigns; the rssitems only work on the RSS email). Note: you may not want to set $constrain_rss_img to Y as that is enlarging images which are smaller than your email. So this could possibly be a browser issue, because I am consistently seeing the images.

    I did a quick search in the plugin directory for “rss media:content” and got a handful of results, including RSS Featured Image, which should work with the Mailchimp image merge tag. If you use both plugins and the image tag, make sure this one is set to not add the featured image to your content, as I expect you would get duplicated images.

    Thread Starter RadiantFreedom

    (@radiantfreedom)

    5 years, 1 month ago

    I ran a test in first Firefox, then in Chrome, the images work fine in Chrome but not in Firefox, so it looks like this may be a browser issue. Thanks for all your help in this stage of the troubleshooting! At least now we can rule out MailChimp, WordPress, or any of its themes or plugins as the culprit.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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