Newsletter Plugin
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just wondering if anyone knew of a newsletter plugin that was as nice as this one:
http://www.shiftthis.net/wordpress-newsletter-plugin/
the closest one iv’e seen is the phplist one.
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No, ShiftThis newsletter seems to be the best one. Only it’s crashed on me and I’m currently trying to work out how to resolve it. IF I can get it working (and ShiftThis themselves declare that support is not guaranteed) then it will be worth the $30.
If not, not. 😉
hi mukaumedia… question: this plugin works for scheduled posts? ie: if I schedule stories to drop in the future, will I be able to add those to the newsletter, preview them in the newsletter template and schedule a blast for the next day after all of the stories have dropped?
and also… does this newsletter plug in allow for plain text version too? i appreciate your help on this in advance!
Has anyone looked at mailPress at all? It’s been entered for the WLTC Plugin competition for this year.
thanks mosey… i checked it but it is not clear to me if it allow for the following:
this plugin works for scheduled posts? ie: if I schedule stories to drop in the future, will I be able to add those to the newsletter, preview them in the newsletter template and schedule a blast for the next day after all of the stories have dropped?
do you know? Would appreciate your help.
@mrosario: Just to clarify – are you planning to post e.g. 3 articles a day and then send an automated email out to everyone with the content of all 3 articles included in the email?
If so, then Subscribe2 might be more suitable for you?
I use it to send out email on a per-post basis, but having looked at the settings again, it is possible to change it so that the email is sent ‘Hourly, Daily or Weekly’
Never had any problems with it at all, and it is actively maintained/developed.
ok, this is what I do (or plan to do, because I use the same method but for a different site that does not use WP and only a flatfile CMS and want to see if the same method can be used if I change my platform to WP)
– I schedule posts to drop in my homepage every day from 3 AM to 5 AM, with a total of 7 posts);
– While I schedule posts to the website, the newsletter template (which is, in itself different and independent from the site), is populated with these items automatically (when they drop at the scheduled times, they disappear from the newsletter template and I have an empty template for the next day);
– this gives me a chance to build the newsletter blast before the stories get published (in other words, the day before). I just pick up the HTML code, paste it into the mailing list system and schedule it to be sent out the next day at 7 AM.
– and that’s all… I want to be able to do the same thing: ie, have a different template for my newsletter, to be able to select stories that I have scheduled in WP and to be able to preview it and schedule it to be blasted out at a specific day and time… can I do that with this plug in or should I use subscribe2?
by the way, the newsletter only sends out the blurbs of the posts not the full item… in other words, just the items as they appear in the homepage… readers would then lick the “read more” link to access the full story
You can certainly try installing Subscribe2 and playing around with it. I think it really cuts out all the manual side of picking up/pasting HTML (so it doesn’t have quite the same options as perhaps Shift This does – never used this plugin so I don’t know really)
Its main function is to pick up the newest posts into a digest and send them out according to the time you’ve set. For mine, it’s every post. But you can set it to send at a particular time, and it is possible to edit the template, although the default one works fine for me.
Perhaps it might be best to install it and try it out?
ok thanks mosey… will try it and let you know
hi mosey… so i tried it but its not what I was expecting… it has only three options for sending the newsletter and none of them contain the plain text/html. also, the digest is sent out daily and my newsletter is sent out mo-friday… i don’t want subscribers to receive duplicates on sat and sundays… i tried mailpress but it only took me as far as the activation… it gives me this error message when I want to activate the plugin… do you know what’s wrong? will appreciate your help.
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/miguelr2/public_html/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/MailPress.php on line 93
Plain text is enabled by default for users who have not registered.
From the Subscribe2 FAQ about this:
There are a maximum of three different emails types:
* Plain Text – Excerpt
* Plain Text – Full Post
* HTML – Full PostSubscribe2 allows Registered Users the option to receive emails in HTML format. Public Subscribers will only receive plain text emails containing an excerpt of the post.
The additional options given to registered users are intended to provide an incentive to sign up to the blog.
HTML emails are not officially supported for non-registered users. If you want this functionality please feel free to amend the code yourself or you can contact me for a fee-payable bespoke solution.
As far as I am aware, the daily digest only sends out *new* posts for the day, so if posts are only released for Monday to Friday, and the next post is for Monday of the following, no duplicate email should be sent out for Saturday and Sunday.
And with regards to MailPress, I’ve not used it myself, but it was a suggestion 🙂 You could try downloading and re-uploading Mailpress.php again since (with ref to the error msg you posted) it’s just missing one or two things.
thanks mosey… i would like to amend it myself but where are the instructions? the funny thing is that the admin for subscribe2 allows us to change the defult subscription for users (from text to html) but it does not explain how to change or create an HTML template for it…
I have to admit I had always assumed that the templates provided within the plugin also allowed for HTML, but I’ve never tested this myself, so I’m not sure. Is this what you’re seeing at the moment?
hi mosey. sorry for the late reply…. subscribe2 only provides a text box for a basic email blast… i tried adding the html code of my newsletter template to it with the instruction POST inside it, so that the WP blurbs load within it and when the blast was sent out, it was sent out in plain text and not in html… and so all of the code shows in the email surrounding the headlines…
i don’t know, but I think this is not going to work at all and I may have to build the newsletter from scratch everyday in my other CMS as I post to WP…
I am trying to install MailPress as my last option and the system is still giving me the same error message as posted earlier, even though my hosting company upgraded my account with the latest version of PHP
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING, expecting T_OLD_FUNCTION or T_FUNCTION or T_VAR or ‘}’ in /home/miguelr2/public_html/wp-content/plugins/mailpress/MailPress.php on line 93
any other suggestions? will be greately appreciated….
in a nutshell, all i am looking to do is to be able to send the blurbs of my latest post blogs to my subscribers using a custom template.
i want to be able to change the template, schedule the blast and be able to send both text and html according to the user’s option. (currently i am using a newsletter system that allows the users to pick which format to receive, either text or HTML).
I want to be able to send the blurbs and pix just like the homepage and not just the headlines…
I read on one of the forum threads that MailPress needs at least 5.2.5, so hopefully your host has upgraded to this? And also, have you tried downloading MailPress again recently? It was last updated (v1.5.1) on 26th July.
I’ll try out the text box within the next few days as well for Subscribe2.
the Shifthis newsletter plugin has some good features. (I’m struggling with it right now) but the support purely sucks, even though Marcus re-opened the forum, there’s no real help there and he doesn’t seem to reply that much, especially to the hard stuff.
My biggest issue with is, after figuring out how to get the mailed html email to work as desired is that the documentation of import/export of subscribers (import because you have a huge csv of email addresses you want to add) is less than useful.
I look at the example given and compare that with what I export with 3 test subscribers and the examples don’t match. Heck, it’s different for even the 3 test rows. SIGH.
I tried phplist and the wp plugin that works with it but it won’t send the html formatted in a way that my own email program even displays it… (Thunderbird) and I do have “original html” turned on.
sigh. I’ll just figure out how to use a bit of sql to write to the table, I guess.
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