Questions about this plugin

@iamonlythird,

Thank you for your remarks and suggestions. Hopefully, my answers to your questions are of any use to you.

1. This is a good question which has been asked before. In the FAQ you can find the solution. Eventually, this will be updated in a manner that is more suitable for everybody and should solve this problem.

2. By the default the settings are only available to the admin of your site. However, in some situations you may want other WordPress users of your site to be able to configure certain parts of this plugin. Therefore, you can delegate some of these rights to them.

3. By default, WordPress uses the following email address: [email protected]. This setting allows you to override the default value.

4. The WP-cron feature does indeed depent on visitors, or the hoster of your website may have configured something on the system that triggers the WP-cron. The number of subscribers should not be an issue. If the ‘Cron jobs enabled’ option is set to ‘yes’, then an email is prepared for every subscriber and placed in queue. Later, when the WP-cron kicks in it will check if the number of minutes configured in ‘How often does the cron jon run’ has passed. When it has, the number of ‘Maximum number of emails allowed to send per burst’ are sent from the queue.

It is important to think of how long it may take to send all emails in the queue. For example, if your hoster only allows you to send 1,000 emails per hour, then it will take at least 50 hours to send all 50,000 emails.

5. The Return-Path is a more advanced setting. To keep things simple, the Return-Path is used to send bounce messages to (e.g. when a mail is not accepted by a mail server). This is not always the same as the From address. Not all hosters allow you to change this setting, but if you are allowed to do so, then it is best to set the Return-Path address to the same value as that of the From address. Some mail providers or mail clients use the Return-Path value to guess if an email is spam.

6. When the widget is enabled in the plugin, it still needs to be moved to a location on your website. WordPress allows you to do this by going to Appearance -> Widgets. When the widget is enabled in the SubMe plugin, then you should see it between the other widgets.

7. Good suggestion. Currently, there are no plans on making larger changes, but this is a feature I would consider for future work.

Thank you very much for the quick response and all the details. This was very helpful indeed.

Just to note that the widget only appeared once the configuration status is shown as OK – this is why I could not find it before.

If you don’t mind, I have a number of follow up questions (or requests if you wish).

1. How is this script in terms of performance? I have not yet digged into the source code to explore myself but I thought I would throw the question out there. What I like so far is that it is very lightweight and seem to only have features that are necessary. Most, if not all, newsletter type of plugins are filled with features and configuration options, often resulting in performance issues.

2. Do you have any plans to implement a bounce type of management? Currently, if I am not mistaken, there is no system in place to deactivate emails addresses that are bouncing.

3. Any plans to implement ajax with the widget subscription box?

4. The reason we would use this plugin is for a way to send automated weekly messages to subscribers listing the posts of the week.

We have two options. Either we will code the plugin from scratch, which was what we intended initially. The issue with this approach is that there are A LOT of features we will need to add in order to make it work the way we want. Almost all of these features are already present in your plugin.

The other option is to enhance your plugin and simply code the weekly newsletter feature. Speaking from personal experience, the concern here is that working with someone else’s code can be relatively painful, particularly if you need to make major enhancements.

Before we jump on either ship, can you please let me know if you have any plans to add a weekly newsletter type of feature in the very near future? I’m guessing the workflow could be:

– WP Cron runs once per week and checks for posts published since last cron run (or since last week).

– Gets post titles, URLs and potentially categories. Adds them in a list within a template message (maybe you can add it as a “Keyword substitution” within the Template settings).

If you would delve into this feature, I would love to help if you need it. I code myself and I have a number of people in the office who do too.

Overall, as I noted in my original message. This is a great plugin, the problem is simply that it is coded for smaller type of blogs that publish relatively rarely.

I think with the features I listed above, this plugin could be extremely appealing to larger platforms. A lot more than the current leading newsletter plugins because most of us who work with larger platforms would only implement third-party plugins if they contain the exact features we need or we would code it ourselves.

Sorry about the lengthy message and thank you for your support!

Sorry for the late reply, but sadly I wasn’t able to reply sooner.

1. Although I don’t think performance should not be too much of an issue, I haven’t tested it with 50,000 email addresses. When a new post is published and the cron functionality is used, then an email is prepared for each subscriber and it will be stored in the database. I can image that this may take a few seconds with large amount of subscribers. However, this also depends on the web/database server configuration.

2. At this stage there are no plans for managing bounce messages. This requires extra features, such as reading out a bounce mailbox via pop3 or imap. There may already be plugins that can handle this, but I’m not sure. I also do not know how easily you can configure them to work the SubMe database schema.

3. At the moment no, but this is something that might be added later on.

4. Honestly, there are no plans for implementing this feature in the near future. Before such a feature will be implemented, there needs to be decided on how settings can be managed by subscribers. Another feature we’ve been asked about before is the option to subscribe to a specific category or author. We like to organize these features first, before we jump into things. Another issue is time, but this is probably something you are very familiar with yourself.

I’m sorry if this plugin doesn’t meet all your needs, but thank you very much for all the thoughts you have put into this and help improve the quality of this plugin.

Thank you very much for the response and don’t worry about replying late, I completely understand.

We have spent some time looking through the source of this plugin and it is looking really neat, great job.

We will create a few custom plugins for it. All of this will not be very userfriendly and will likely have all configuration within the code, but we will keep things simple. All the adjustments will be posted here so that other users can use it if it may come handy.

I do have one final question and this is one is a significant feature. If I am not mistaken, there is no way currently to auto add all registered users emails to the subscribers list whenever the user signs up? If not, we may need to create a plugin for this as well.

Thanks again for your time and please do continue to develop this plugin whenever you have the time and interest.

There is indeed no function that auto adds new registered users emails to the subscribers list. It was actually a design decision to keep user registration and subscriptions seperated.

I look forward to seeing some of your custom created plugins, and maybe some of them will end up in the plugin ??

Excellent. I have already posted a solution to this, and I think this should be added to the core plugin as a setting option.

And we have already coded a function that sends weekly multipart messages. I have to say though, there were a great number of tweaks.

We are testing this function next week, if it works, which it should, I will definitely post it here.