|
|
Your donation is like a diamond: it's forever. More about donations I receive. See other plugins that can be useful for your blog. |
Welcome to Newsletter/Neswletter Pro from Stefano Lissa.
I hope Newsletter/Neswletter Pro will be a powerful tool for your business. I made the whole configuration as simple as possible but keeping an eye on flexibility, specially in respect of all the world languages. I'm Italian and I know how much stressing job is the plug-in translation!
This guide is common to Newsletter and Newsletter Pro, so here you will find some chapters with instructions on how to operate with Newsletter Pro features: if you're running Newsletter free, just skip them.
If you want to know more about Newsletter Pro, take a look to this page (opens on a new window) or go directly to the Member's site (opens in a new window).
References to pages where leave comments or find support can be find on this page (opens on a new window).
Every non obvious options you find on configuration panels has a little documentation box. Many users asked me to include the documentation on Newsletter panels and even if that make them a little bit "verbose", I think it's of great help.
Please, take the time to read the info box of each option, specially on main configuration panel, because some values, even if formally correct, can be the cause of errors (due to your hosting provider policy or limits).
If you have questions due to missing part on this documentation, send me an email to stefano@satollo.net so I can complete it and clear any doubt.
Nothing is working!
The plugin is working on my main site (www.satollo.net), I use there the free version just to be sure it works for all. So, have you DEACTIVATED and REACTIVATED it after a manual update (with WordPress automatic upgrade, WordPress takes care of it for you - but you can try that manually).
Where is the version history?
On readme.txt file.
Email are not sent (but test emails are).
On email list panel there is a delivery engine next run. If it is negative or empty or zero (always) the WordPress cron system is not working. Read below about delivery engine and the WordPress cron system.
Multisite WordPress, nothing work.
It's a bit tricky: you must activate the plugin with your super admin account, then enter every blog dashboard, and deactivate and reactivate the plugin.
Newsletter panels are organized as described below. It is separated in modules, so if you don't
need the feed by mail service or you don't need the follow up service, you can ignore them safely.
Every panel contains it's own documentation, but here you can find special cases or examples.
Every setting in the main configuration panel is adequately described there, just be sure to read every note because some apparently legal values can block the emails from your account.
One important parameter is the number of email per hour you want Newsletter to send. This limit is applied to newsletters, feed by mail and follow up emails.
Newsletter Pro uses the mailing functions of WordPress to send emails so you can use any plugin that extend the WordPress mailing system and it will act on Newsletter Pro emails too.
Optionally, on main configuration panel, you can choose to use an "external" SMTP service. In that case Newsletter Pro sends emails on it's own, using directly the WordPress included libraries. Using the SMTP of Newsletter Pro than installing a plugin that forces WordPress standard mailing function to use the same SMTP is usually more efficient. Newsletter Pro will use that SMTP for any message it needs to send (not only newsletters even welcome and confirmation messages will be sent via SMTP).
If the Mailer plugin is installed, Newsletter Pro adds some special headers on outgoing emails so Mailer can detect them and schedule correctly every message. Newsletters are send with priority 2 while any other message (usually confirmation and welcome messages) is sent with priority 0 (real time).
Mailer or other plugins that throttles emails going out from your blog are not required, since Newsletter has it's own email throttling system.
Read carefully if you use a cache system!
With Newsletter Pro you can lock out some content of you blog, making it available only to confirmed subscriber. The feature can be configured on main configuration panel.
Using the feature is very simple: on a post identify the content you want to lock out and surround it with shot code [newsletter_lock]...[/newsletter_lock]. You can lock out multiple piece of content, too.
In place of the hidden content a short message is shown, as configured in main configuration panel (where there are some tips on what to write in it). When a user subscribe and confirm the subscription or click on his personal unlocking url ({unlock_url} that you should put only on welcome email) a cookie is added to his browser and the lock is removed every where on the blog.
Warning. Be sure to not cache the posts with locked content, otherwise there are chances that subscribers see always the lock message or, worse, the unlocked content is shown to every one. Newsletter Pro is already integrated with Hyper Cache, for other cache systems just add a cache bypass based on presence of "newsletter" cookie.
The main thing you should care of is the subscription configuration. It's not so hard but there are some choices you need to take and that suite your audience and may be your local laws.
Subscription can be single opt in or double opt in. Choosing the one or the other will change the configuration panel to show you only the needed options.
Single opt in is not too much legal, since you assume that the subscribed email address is correct and owned by who performed the subscription. Double opt in subscription (which is required for example by DreamHost) activate the subscriber only after he confirm his email address (by an activation email send by Newsletter).
User profile is the set of data you can collect about subscribers during the subscription or on their profile panel:
Even if Newsletter Pro lets you to collect all that data, it's recommended to ask the subscriber the smallest set of fields possible, to avoid subscription loss. It's usually more profitable to give the subscriber a complete profile form where to fill in more data on a second time. You can offer the complete profile form just after the sign up or invite the user to complete his data with a follow up email or with a link to the profile form on newsletters you'll send.
Subscription and profile forms, as generated by Newsletter Pro, are controlled under the "user profile" panel. There you can decide what fields to ask on subscription time and what fields on profile editing step.
You can also translate every single word in you language!
Check the hints in the panel for detailed explanation of every single field.
Subscritpion texts, email bodies, email subjects and so on accept (usually) a set of tag that will be replaced with user specific content (like her name).
{subscription_confirm_url}
URL to build a link to confirmation of subscription when double opt-in is used. To be used on confirmation email.
{unsubscription_url}
URL to build a link to start the cancellation process. To be used on every newsletter to let the user to cancel.
{unsubscription_confirm_url}
URL to build a link to an immediate cancellation action. Can be used on newsletters if you want an immediate cancellation or
on cancellation page (displayed on {unsubscription_url}) to ask a cancellation confirmation.
{profile_url}
URL to build a link to user's profile page (see the User Profile panel)
{unlock_url}
Special URL to build a link that on click unlocks protected contents. See Main Configuration panel.
{profile_form}
Insert the profile form with user's data. Usually it make sense only on welcome page.
You need HTML skills to create custom forms, but it is so easy that a consultant should charge a very low fee to do it for you (or ask to a nephew...).
As general rule, you can create a custom form on every subscription point: the Newsletter Pro main page, on Newsletter Pro widgets, on alternative messages for locked content.
To create a custom form is very easy, here an example that asks the user only it's email:
<form>
as you can see the form tag has not attributes (method, action, ...): they are added
automatically by Newsletter Pro. If you need to fire a JavaScript call before the form submission
add an "onclick" event to the submit button.
<input type="text" name="ne"/>
<input type="submit"/>
</form>
The field names you can add to a custom form are:
For lists on a custom form you can ask the user to check what lists he want to subscribe or put an "hidden" list field to "force" the subscription on that list. The latter option is used when different forms collect users on different lists without asking directly to the subscriber.
An example of check box field for a list is:
<input type="checkbox" name="nl[]" value="3"/>
Emails are created from the "emails" panel. When you enter the panel you'll se the emails archived and their status.
Each email has a subject and a body, but some other information are stored: targeted users, if link clicks can be tracked, a status, the number of receivers and how many copies have already been sent.
You can create as many email as you want and you can even send many of them simultaneously.
An email has few possible statuses:
When you abort an email sending, the email return to the "new" status and every sending progress information is reset.
When a new email is create, it can be composed starting from a blank sheet or can be auto composed with a theme. I call it auto compose because a theme can generate actual content getting it from the blog (a list of latest posts, tag cloud and so on) or simply prepare an already structured content.
Themes are PHP file stored under "themes" folder. There are some pre packaged themes that can be used as starting point for your specific theme.
To create a new theme follow the steps below (names must be lowercase):
To start with an already working theme, start with "theme.php" file of "themes/theme-1" folder.
Theme used to compose an email is store with the email data. If a theme has a style.css file in its folder, the content of this file is added to outgoing emails. Not all email readers respect the style added in this way... GMail is an example of them.
The style.css file is used while editing the email too to make the visual editor show the content as looking like the resulting email opened in a mail reader.
Follow up or auto-responder is when you send a sequence of emails to new subscribers. A follow up can be a series of lessons on a topic, a product/service presentation broken up on small parts or anything else. Those emails are typically sent every few days (configurable, of course).
Once you have created your follow up emails (up to 10) and activated the system, it starts to work for you contacting the new subscribers as if you're writing to each of them all in autopilot.
A subscriber can unsubscribe from the follow up without removing him self from the list: simply the "follow up" status will be set to "stop". This point is of great importance, because you can let the user to stop annoying (to them) messages without loosing him. That "follow up unsubscription" is done via a link you should add to each follow up email. The link is inserted on every occurrence of {followup_unsubscription_url} place holder.
To give a common skin to each follow up message, the autoresponder applies a theme to every email body on configuration panel, so they can be considered only the "content" of follow up messages.
Follow up themes are store under the folder "themes-followup" and prepackaged there are a couple of themes, one almost empty (it contains only a footer text with unsubscription link) and the other a little bit richer.
Any theme must contain a special tag, {message}, which will be replaced with the current follow up email content.
To modify a theme follow the same guide lines for feed by mail themes, just use a themes-followup folder instead of themes-feed.
Feed by mail is a Newsletter Pro service that sends an excerpt of last posts to subscribers who signed up for it. It's something like Google FeedBurner and other external services. What makes the difference is:
On feed by mail panel all options are documented, I suggest to subscribe only your self to feed by mail and see the messages Newsletter Pro delivers to your mailbox.
Packaged feed by mail themes are stored under the themes-feed folder. Every theme is a subfolder containing, at least, the theme.php file. Packaged themes should be your start point for a new theme, but do not modify them directly, otherwise on next Newsletter Pro version upgrade modifications will be lost.
To create a new theme, as for generic newsletter themes, follow the steps below (names must be lowercase):
To start with an already working theme, start with "theme.php" file of "themes-feed/feed-1" folder or the more complex "themes-feed/feed-2" folder: they are well documented.
Do not use one of the "theme.php" files for normal newsletters, the ones you can found under "themes" folder, because they do not work!
Newsletter relies on WordPress cron service to automatically send emails respecting the emails per hour value you set on main configuration panel.
That WordPress service works only if your blog has traffic, if not it usually works bad. To make it running as required, you must trigger it with a regular external call (very five minutes) to: