CoPress

Courier, my open source e-mail newsletter plugin for WordPress, is now an official product of CoPress. Although this change won’t mean much to the everyday user, for CoPress clients, it means guaranteed support for any technical issues related to the plugin.

The everyday user will notice improvements to the latest version of the plugin. 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 takeeffect.

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 now has a new website, wpcourier.com, where you can stay attuned to all Courier news and updates. The site will include best practices for create e-mail editions and curating users. You can also follow Courier’s updates on Twitter @wpcourier.

It’s the little things…

You’ve invariably heard the phrase turned before, whether speaking about life’s pleasures or why a product is popular. Often, it applies to products on the Web; “It’s the little things that make Gmail so good,” or, “Why does WordPress dominate as self-hosted software? It’s the little things.”

And that it is. WordPress is quickly becoming the go-to solution for those who want ease of operation combined with a full feature set and nearly limitless extendability. The software’s popularity, however, is also part of its downfall: because of an enthusiastic community that pumps out new themes every day, oftentimes the product’s back end capabilities do not match up with what is seen by the audience.

Luckily, it’s generally easy to modify themes that were not necessarily well thought out or executed. Whether by enabling a plugin or hacking some PHP, college news organizations can greatly increase the presentation and functionality of their sites with a minimum of time and effort. Before doing so, however, one needs ideas.

Thus, I present to you a number of small improvements for your WordPress-based news site (in no particular order). Read more →