Sean Conklin

Hi Pedro,

The RSS feed URL you are putting in looks correct to me. Are you getting any specific error from it that might narrow it down?

On their instructions, they indicate you can contact Benchmark Email support for assistance since that is a core Benchmark Email feature not specific to our WP Plugin but available for any RSS service. They might know of a trick with the latest WP RSS native feed and is worth a shot.

Alternatively, you could install a free feed burner plugin that generates an alternative feed URL to try out.

I’ll ask my colleague Randy to run through those RSS instructions and see if he can figure out any tricks to get it to work. I plan to work on the plugin this weekend and will let you know about your other question soon…

Thanks,
Sean

Hi Pedro,

It turns out this feature is already built into Benchmark Email via their user interface. See the following link for configuring the campaign:

https://ui.benchmarkemail.com/help-FAQ/answer/how-do-i-create-an-rss-to-email-campaign

You will need your WordPress RSS URL. This can be the built in feed or use a plugin to provide more specific feeds for this usage.

We may still add this feature so it’s built into the WP plugin, but this should help you out in the short term ??

Hi peucaio,

That’s an excellent feature idea. We don’t currently have it, but I see this as a fairly quick and useful add-on. Here’s an idea we could work on over the next several weeks:

– Admin area section titles “Schedule Regular Post Updates”
– Select WP Cron schedule [Off, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly]
– Select list(s), set title, from name, etc.
– Select WP post categories to use
– No ability to send test email yet (must set a test contact list initially)

Let us know how that plan sounds…

No charge as this is for Benchmark’s WordPress customers and we are an Affiliate Partner.

Thanks,
Sean

Hi skdmedia,

Thank you for reaching out and providing the details. The applicable error here is “Notice: The called constructor method for WP_Widget is deprecated since version 4.3.0! Use__construct() instead. in /Users/scottdouglas/Documents/Websites/www.skdmx2.dev/wp-includes/functions.php on line 3624”

That is a PHP Notice, which is considered benign. It only appears when one has a debugger plugin running (ex: WP-DEBUG mode), which is specific to development websites and would not affect Live environments.

We did actually fix this in our development version and it will go into our next release v2.6 coming up in the next couple of months. If you need the fix now, you can install the 2.6-devel from the Developers tab on the plugin page under the Other Versions heading.

Let me know if I can be of any further help, and thanks for using our plugin ??

Sean

Hi stojsa1,

Benchmark Email does offer an ability to create sign up forms hosted on their servers that use JS and they give you copy/paste code to toss in. It’s not as designer friendly or functional as the WP plugin can provide, but that might suit your needs for the interim.

Go here and click “Signup Forms” to watch the video:
https://www.benchmarkemail.com/resources/video-tutorials

That’s sad to hear they won’t let plugins that need to communicate with web services function. Security is always a balance with convenience, and it’s key to make decisions that weigh the balance out well.

So without PHP being able to reach out, you’re left with having the user’s browser do it with JavaScript. Benchmark Email does offer an ability to create sign up forms hosted on their servers that use JS and they give you copy/paste code to toss in. It’s not as designer friendly or functional, but that might suit your needs for the interim.

This is the first we’ve heard of PHP being totally blocked from outbound communications. If we were to come across that more often, we could develop a JS version of the BMEL plugin’s sign up form feature that fits just as well within the design theme but offers that single function. Of course the rest of the plugin (sending campaigns from WP, viewing email statistics from WP, etc) would remain offline.

Another thing that might help is to temporarily set your WP_DEBUG line in your wp-config.php file to true (default is false). Doing that will enable PHP notices, warnings, and errors to print on the screen. It’s possible you may get a tun of messages on your site and have to disable it quickly (depends on theme and plugins enabled), but if it’s relatively clean that could point out the issue for us.

If the server guys can reproduce the problem with that unit test code, then can see the error(s) in the PHP error log even without WP_DEBUG turned on.

Again, if all that fails we can make a better test file of our own to track it down.

So at this point it does appear to be a host related issue. I am not myself familiar with Wealthy Affiliate, but I am happy to speak with their technician if it comes to that.

Let’s have you go ahead and open a support ticket with them on your behalf and see what they might provide us. Please provide them with the unit test code (the PHP code you opened this thread with) so they can reproduce the issue in their environment.

Ultimately, the problem could be that they do not have certain PHP modules installed that support XML-RPC communications. It’s also possible they have some WordPress security hardening configurations that cripple outbound communications from the web nodes. Let’s put this on their radar and see if they have any insights on that.

If we aren’t able to get anywhere with them in a timely manner, I can come up with more unit test code for us to better trace the problem, where it prints to the screen line by line what it’s doing and where the problem(s) come up.

Hi Aiden,

I tested your API key on my local sandbox machine and it worked just fine running the Benchmark Email Lite plugin on the latest www.remarpro.com version and a MAMP server environment. So we know your API key is good.

The unit test code you provided should output something, but that depends on where they had you put it within WordPress. It appears it’s meant to go as a separate file in your WordPress root folder that you navigate to directly, such as https://mysite.com/test-benchmark.php

Now, as to your server, there could be a number of possible culprits. Could you start by telling me more about your site?:

– Who you use for hosting, or your website URL we can check on
– What versions of things like WP and PHP you run
– If there is a history of any security workarounds you had to do to get other plugins or WP core features to work, particularly areas which communicate outbound from the site.

Hi photokulinar,

We do not currently support putting the post excerpt into the email template. We’ll take this as a suggestion for the next version. Thanks for your feedback.

We’re not aware of any bug regarding the email template not saving at all. Can you please specify your version of WordPress, web browser and version, and who you host on? My colleague, Randy, will try to reproduce that, and if so we’ll issue a fix.

Thanks,
Sean

Hi shivika. It’s only pre-populating your name and email address because you are logged in. If you log out of your WP site, you should see what other users see who are not logged in as you.

We don’t currently have placeholder text on the form fields, but we’ll take that as a suggestion.

Thanks!
Sean

In a multisite network each site must have its own plugins enabled/activated. However, as the network administrator you can “network enable” plugins to force them ON for each and every sub site. Each sub site needs its own configuration, so set-up the API key(s) in each site’s wp-admin area.

Hi. The sign up forms can appear in any widget sidebar/area or in a page or post with a short code. So to make it pop up or fly in your theme or another plugin running would need to be able to render a page/post or widget in such a context.

There are various techniques for this, so I can’t really point you in one direction, other than to say to try some plugins out there in a dev environment to test them out, or contact your theme developer or designer for the best fit for your site.

So it sounds like we don’t have an error after all. The message “No results found for the following API key(s)” means that there are no existing email campaigns to display statistics for under that API key.

In order to display emails there, you must first create at least one and send it out. Email campaigns can be created through the plugin by sending a page or post from WordPress (See Benchmark Email Lite Metabox), or from the Benchmark Email direct user interface at https://ui.benchmarkemail.com/

Let us know if that resolves your issue or if you have further questions for us.

Thanks,
Sean

This suggests to me that there is no communication problem, rather there are no sent email campaigns to display in the Emails area for the API key entered.

1) Are you using the latest version v2.5?

2) Do you have any existing email campaigns to display (when you log into ui.benchmarkemail.com)?

3) Is the API key you are using configured for the same Benchmark Email account or sub-account containing the email campaigns and contact lists you want to connect WordPress to?

Thanks,
Sean