January 22nd, 2010
A few weeks ago I pushed out Courier 0.3, and in the intervening few weeks have pushed out minor updates to add a few new functionalities and fix a few typos and errors.
Courier 0.3 includes major improvements to both stability and functionality. The biggest and most important improvement is queuing support. Instead of sending all e-mails at once when you click the send, the plugin instead queues the e-mails and sends them at a rate you determine. Not only does this protect you in the case the script hangs up when you’re sending e-mails (such as when you have thousands of subscribers), but it also makes sure the e-mail script doesn’t take down the entire server.
This new feature uses WP Cron to minimize setup time. You can schedule a test e-mail in the Courier dashboard to make sure WP Cron works. If it doesn’t you have a few options: you can disable queuing in the dashboard, which I don’t recommend if you have a number of subscribers, or you can set up Crontab to visit wp-cron.php every minute. I would recommend finding the root cause of why WP Cron doesn’t fire, though — otherwise you might have bigger problems than Courier not working correctly.
Courier 0.3 integrates with WordPress users, allowing you to manage subscriptions within the WordPress profile. It still supports users outside of WordPress, and I have no plans to phase out that support.
Courier 0.3.5 includes a sidebar widget, so you can now add the registration form to your sidebar.
I should note that if you upgrade Courier outside of WordPress (i.e. through FTP) you will need to deactivate and reactivate Courier before many of the new features will take effect.
If you’re testing Courier and run into any problems, please feel free to e-mail me (will@copress.org), and I will be glad to help. I am hoping to have a major (1.0) release out within two weeks, and if you encounter any errors or anomalies it’s important they be fixed before then.
Finally, Courier is now an official plugin supported by CoPress, although it is still open source and authored by me.
Posted in Announcements, Development | 2 Comments »
January 3rd, 2010
After a few months of posting about it on a few different blogs, Courier now has a new and permanent home — wpcourier.com — and a new look, with huge thanks to Lauren Rabaino. I’ve populated this site with a couple back posts from other sites, and it will evolve into a resource not only for how to use Courier but as a guide to best practices when creating e-mail campaigns. If you have questions you can feel free to e-mail them to me at will@wpdavis.com.
Posted in Announcements | 3 Comments »
November 11th, 2009
I’ve been working some on Courier recently, and am on the verge of a new, fairly major, release. In the new version you will see:
- The ability to map Courier users to WordPress users
- Queueing support
- Statistics on subscriber base changes
The biggest problem I’ve been having so far is getting WP Chron to work. It doesn’t seem to fire, meaning that no e-mails are sent. I’m also worried about ensuring that all e-mails are sent — in the current system, you’re presented with a list of all the e-mails sent and whether they succeeded or failed. With queueing, it’s harder to verify that all the e-mails went out.
I’ll most likely be attending WordCamp this Saturday, and hopefully I’ll have the chance to ask some people smarter than me what I’m doing wrong.
Posted in Development | No Comments »
August 26th, 2009
MailPress calls itself “the WordPress mailing platform.” Unfortunately, MailPress didn’t do all we wanted it to — mainly it didn’t have the flexibility I was looking for in a plugin to handle our e-mail edition. Enter WordPress Courier, a plugin I built from scratch aimed directly at managing newspapers’ e-mail editions. One of the things that I enjoyed about College Publisher was its e-mail editions, which were simple to send out yet fairly attractive. Many newspapers have to resort to third-party solutions, such as Constant Contact, to manage their e-mail newsletters. Not only are these e-mails time consuming to put together, they aren’t very attractive, either.
Using Courier, you can make your e-mails as advanced or as simple as you please (see an example here). E-mails are based on templates but each e-mail is easily customized. When you first initiate an e-mail — let’s say you want to send out your daily headlines — a preview is automatically created from your template. In many cases, you can send this e-mail out right away without any changes, but let’s say you want to delete a story from your e-mail — maybe it was already sent out as breaking news — or want to move a story up. Maybe you want to add an editor’s note of modify your nameplate because it’s a holiday. You are presented with the full source code to modify as you wish, and can preview the e-mail as many times as you like before finally sending out the e-mail.
The goal is to find a line between automation and control. In the future, more features will be added to increase your control, such as a text-only edition, advanced analytics and SMS text integration, but not at the expense of simplicity for you, the user.
Posted in Announcements | 3 Comments »
