CoPress

Post edited 12:10 am – July 29, 2009 by William P. Davis
Post edited 12:10 am – July 29, 2009 by William P. Davis
Post edited 12:24 am – July 29, 2009 by Daniel Bachhuber

Development has begun on the first version of the WordPress E-mail Edition.

The first edition will be simple, since I won't be able to work constantly on the plugin and I just a little over a month to release it. There won't be a huge number of customizable options to start with, although it will be easy enough to customize the code so you can change the text and such.

The plugin has a projected release date of September 10, which is (hopefully) before anyone starts production. If people are starting earlier, be sure to let me know so I can push up the release date.

As I imagine the plugin now, it will generate e-mails automatically but you will be able to customize every part of it before the e-mail is sent. For example, if you would like to change the lead of a certain article or add a note somewhere, you can do that without altering the article itself.

Very highest priority:

• Ability to ignore certain categories/posts
• Text and E-mail editions
• At least a per-issue and breaking news e-mail option. Best case scenario, customizable newsletter categories
• A basic, customizable template that supports advertising spots
• Ability to send e-mail to all users without an article
• First version will use PHP mail() function

Future versions:

• URL shortening, with options for different services and compatibility with Short URL Plugin.
• Send out e-mails from specific categories automatically
• Detailed analytics, including bounces, unsubscribes, clicks, etc.
• HTML edition supports widgets, so you can add most popular, recent comments etc.
• SMS text integration
• Future versions will include SMTP support
• Better theming support

Is there anything I'm missing?

I still haven't gotten my list of subscribers from CP yet, so I don't know how hard it will be to import. I'd imagine it will be fairly easy either to do it by hand or for me to add a feature to do it, though.

Also, looking through Configure SMTP might help in figuring out SMTP mailing support for the email newsletters. It's the plugin that Web Faction recommends to add email notification functionality to your WordPress instance (whatever is used normally is disabled on Web Faction servers)

Cool, I'm signed up and the process is straight-forward enough. Are you going to integrate user preferences with the user system that WordPress offers?

@arobinson You can download the alpha version here, though I would wait until the beta version comes out, because the beta version will include an integrated import wizard, among a few other things. We did move from CP, and we have been having some problems getting our subscriber list from them. Most likely you will have to do a minimal amount of formatting before using the import wizard.

@daniel I have signed up for an account in the repository but haven't gotten around to adding it yet. I probably won't until I finish the update and import functions. Thanks for creating the landing page!

Within the next week.