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Category Archives: Email
My MailPress Hacks
I have a small list of hacks that I make to MailPress every time I upgrade. It's been shrinking as some of the issues have been addressed in the plugin, but I thought I'd share my local modifications with you:
Remove "[Blog Name] New post" from Subjects
I'd rather have the Subject line of my newsletters read like a personal email than an automatically generated one, so I change:
mp-content/advanced/newsletters/new_post.xml:
<mail><subject>
Strip '[%1$s] New post : '
mp-content/advanced/newsletters/categories/categories.xml:
<mail><Template>singlecat</Template><subject>
Strip '[%1$s] New post in {{the_category}} : '
Friendlier Messages
I like messages that are clear to non-MailPress users, so I change:
mp-content/languages/MailPress.pot:4149 &
mp-includes/class/MP_Widget.class.php:104:
Change "Waiting for your confirmation" to "Check your inbox and confirm your email address"
mp-content/languages/MailPress.pot:4133 &
mp-includes/class/MP_Widget.class.php:99:
Change "Loading..." to "Processing..."… Continue reading…
How to Send Your Newsletter Subscribers A Welcome Message
On The Confident Man Project, I wanted to send my new newsletter subscribers a Welcome message including a link to a bonus audio download that I promised them in the subscription box.
There are two ways to do this:
Using an Autoresponder
Create an autoresponder triggered by new newsletter subscriptions, and attach your welcome email to it. With this approach, the subscriber gets both a confirmation email, and a welcome email.
Here are the steps:
On the WordPress dashboard click Mails → Autoresponders
Add an Autoresponder Named newsletter, Slug newsletter, Description New newsletter subscriber. Make sure you select Active, and choose the Event Subscription activated. Then click Add Autoresponder.
Now go to Mails → Add New and write the Welcome email that you would like to send. For the recipient, under All choose one of the Newsletters. At the bottom of … Continue reading…
Posted in MailPress 7 Comments
MailPress Enhancement/Bug Fix Wish List
MailPress is the most powerful free email newsletter plug-in for WordPress. Its ability to generate automatic newsletters from your posts is a great time-saver. Plus it has some powerful advanced features like open rate and link tracking, mailing lists and autoresponders.
Yet MailPress 5.1.1 also has some limitations, missing features and bugs which can really get in my way when I use it. At present it's merely great; once these issues are addressed it will be awesome.
So here's my list of enhancements I wish MailPress had, which would bring it much closer to replacing commercial email solutions like MailChimp and Aweber which don't integrate with WordPress anywhere near as cleanly. If you're a developer, I encourage you to give Andre a hand by submitting patches to add these enhancements, and fix these bugs.
I've ordered the list from most important to least important (to me, anyway):
Easy Subscribe to … Continue reading…
How To Add Users To Your MailPress Newsletter Manually
Every now and then you want to add a new user to your MailPress newsletter and/or mailing list, without them having to go through the normal subscription process. For example, to create test users or for people who you meet and give you their email address offline.
It's easy to do this, but not so easy to find. On your WordPress dashboard, select Mails -> All Users. Scoll down to the bottom of the Users list. Click in the box next to the Bulk Add button. Options appear magically to allow you to select a mailing list to add them to, and whether you need them to confirm (i.e. Require Authorization) or not (i.e. Activate); generally, you want to select Activate. Enter pairs of email addresses and names, separated by , and ;. Then click Bulk Add. All new additions get added to the default newsletter … Continue reading…
How to Disable Content Plugins in a MailPress Newsletter
Many WordPress plugins register the_content filters that alter your posts in some way, like adding bookmarking icons at the bottom of a post, or Google +1 buttons without you having to edit your theme. This is particularly helpful when you change themes, and some plugins make dynamic content modifications that you couldn't do by editing your theme anyway.
MailPress runs these filters when generating your newsletter so that the post looks the same in your newsletter as it does on your site. However, email programs often have bizarre limitations on what they are able to display and sometimes plugins generate content that looks fine in a web browser but doesn't look good at all in email. For example, the SexyBookmarks icons turn into a list of bookmarking links which look way less than sexy when viewed in Windows Live Mail.
When you use a plugin which generates content that doesn't … Continue reading…
How to Style the MailPress Subscription Widget
By default, the MailPress subscription widget looks pretty crude, because it has no styling. To make it look nice like the one on BuildYourBlog.net, you need to add some rules to the style.css file in your theme. Start by creating a child theme, if you haven't already done so. Then add these rules to your child theme's style.css:
/* Center the MailPress subscription form */ .MailPress { text-align: center; } /* Widen the subscription form boxes, and put space between them */ .MailPressFormEmail, .MailPressFormName { width: 190px; margin: 5px 0; }
There is no field in the widget for adding a friendly message inviting your visitors to subscribe, but you can do this by adding:
/* Add a friendly invitation to the top of the MailPress signup form */
.MailPress:before { content: "Enter your Email and Name to Subscribe
to my Free Newsletter:" }These styles … Continue reading…
How to Configure Your Blog's Newsletter in MailPress
MailPress is the most powerful free self-hosted automatic newsletter plugin for WordPress, according to my detailed comparison of WordPress newsletter plugins. But and all that power can make it a little tricky to configure.
Having a newsletter on your blog allows visitors to subscribe to regular updates via email. An automatic newsletter simplifies the process so that all you have to do is post articles to your blog, and the newsletter to your subscribers is built and sent automatically with no extra effort from you. Even with the advent of RSS feeds and Twitter, email is still the easiest way of getting back in touch with people who have visited your blog before, and giving them a reason to visit again.
So here is a step-by-step guide to configuring your MailPress newsletter:
Install MailPress
If you don't already have MailPress installed, now is the time. Add it just like … Continue reading…
How to Embed a MailChimp Signup Form in WordPress
MailChimp provide a great email marketing service; you can start off for free and only have to start paying as your list, and presumably your profit, grows. But I can't for the life of me understand why the embedded signup form they provide is so goddam ugly. I just wanted a simple, attractive box for my visitors to enter their name and email address to subscribe to my Confident Man Online confidence-building course. Yet this is the best I could get out of MailChimp's embedded form generator:
God, that's ugly. What I really wanted was something more like this:
Ah, now that's better. So here's how to fix it:
Firstly, start by setting the fields and colour scheme that you want in the MailChimp form designer under Lists -> Create Forms -> Try Fancy New Forms.
Then … Continue reading…