Tag: newsletter

Customizing Newsletter Glue for WordPress post notifications

I love the Newsletter Glue plugin for WordPress. Before I found it, I had tinkered for a long time with different imperfect solutions to what seemed like a simple need: quickly and easily send people an engaging, visually appealing email when I publish a new article on my website.

I’ve tried manually sending out Mailchimp campaigns after publishing (too slow and cumbersome to customize per post), using messages sent directly from my WordPress host server (too prone to being flagged as spam), automatically generating Mailchimp campaigns from an RSS feed (limited scheduling options and prone to errors), using WordPress.com new post notifications via Jetpack (not very customizable), developing my own plugin to send on demand via MailChimp’s API (very functional but not easily re-usable across sites), and others.

Alas, nothing felt quite like what I wanted.

I’d revisit the challenge now and then, especially when I’d see everybody over there loving on Substack like “oh isn’t amazing how you can send out a readable email newsletter from a website, what an innovation” and found myself rolling my eyes especially hard. “SURELY WE SHOULD BE ABLE TO DO THAT WITH WORDPRESS!” I’d exclaim. And then my family would look at me with tilted heads before going back to whatever they were doing.

I was about to start putting some serious time into turning my own proof of concept Mailchimp API plugin into something reusable and shareable, when I did one last round of research into existing options. And that’s when I found Newsletter Glue. The sky opened up. Light shone down. I did a dance. At least that’s what it felt like. (I see that Justin Tadlock at WP Tavern has had a similar experience.)

So, yes, ahem, where was I? Oh, right: Newsletter Glue is an elegant solution to a real need in the world of WordPress publishing. Go check it out if you haven’t already. I bought a 5-site license and sent Lesley Sim, one of the plugin’s co-creators, a note of appreciation.

The rest of this blog post is about a few additional Newsletter Glue customizations I set up. While some of this is possible via the Newsletter Glue UI, I did it via a small custom plugin that I could re-use across all of my WordPress sites without additional configuration.

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Unlocking email content into RSS feeds redux with WordPress and Postie

As a part of some local journalism projects I’m exploring, I wanted to have a way to get information that is being emailed around (press releases, newsletters) into a publicly accessible RSS feed.

I’ve already explored this general “unlock email into an RSS feed” workflow using Zapier but Zapier’s limitations around translating HTML email messages into useful RSS entries led me to explore other options. For a while now I’ve been using Feedly’s paid feature that lets you receive email at a custom address and puts the content into your feed reading experience, and that’s actually been a good solution for me as an individual. (I made sure to set up an address at a domain I control and aliased that to Feedly’s provided address, in case I want to move to another solution later.)

But if we want to help a given audience have better access to information that’s only available in email but is intended to be public, I don’t think it scales well to ask them all to subscribe to the same email newsletter, or to all sign up for a Feedly paid plan. And yet so many organizations continue to use email as a way to distribute information, often instead of a website, and it doesn’t scale well to beg each of them to start (or go back to?) publishing their updates on a website with an RSS feed.

I started looking at using Mailparser for a more generalized solution. Receive the emails, have Mailparser extract the information into a structured, API-queryable format, and then download that information (including any attachments and images) and put it up on a publicly accessible URL somewhere. I knew I needed a way to organize the information coming in according to the email address of the person who sent it, so I’d have to build a small application that managed that categorization during the publishing process.

And then I realized I was basically getting into CMS territory. Publishing text and media on a website. Organizing content by categories and authors. Searchable and sortable. Yeah, I know a tool that already does all that stuff really well: WordPress.

But was I still going to need to build a glue application to process the emails and create WordPress posts?

I was aware of Jetpack’s post by email feature and I think it could work well for some scenarios, but I wanted something a little more purpose built. I did a little bit of Googling and found Postie, a WordPress plugin that has great features for bringing emails into WordPress posts. I exclaimed many words of delight upon finding it, and continued to be impressed as I looked through the thoughtful documentation, the developer-oriented options for extending and customizing it, and the active support and maintenance that goes into it. The WordPress community is amazing that way. I sent the developer a donation.

So, here’s the new workflow I would use:

  • Email is sent to an alias at my custom domain, which goes to a free email provider with IMAP access.
  • Every half hour, Postie goes out and checks for new email messages and creates pending WordPress posts.
  • I get a notification in a Slack channel about the WordPress post, and can publish it if appropriate.
  • The WordPress site provides a built in RSS feed of “emails” as posts on the site.

Amazing! But I still wanted a way to organize the incoming emails and resulting posts based on sender, without using Postie’s default method of creating WordPress users for each sender.

So, I created a custom taxonomy, Sources, with some term meta fields that allow me to associate email addresses and to select whether posts from that source should be pending or published by default. (Of course, email can be forged so it’s never safe to depend on the value of the “From” address in an email to authenticate anything important.)

Here are some code snippets used to accomplish this in a custom WordPress plugin I set up to complement Postie.

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Create and send custom Mailchimp email campaigns from WordPress

There are lots of Mailchimp + WordPress integrations out there already. But when I wanted to create a customized, automated daily email campaign that would be generated from WordPress content (beyond just a listing of recent posts) and sent to a Mailchimp list, I couldn’t find anything to do just that.

For a little while I used MailChimp’s ability to read RSS feeds and generate campaigns from them, and I built a custom RSS feed on my WordPress site where the latest entry in the feed was the customized content I wanted to be populated into the *|RSSITEM:CONTENT_FULL|* variable to then go out to my subscribers.

But this was unreliable — sometimes the message wouldn’t go out because of caching issues on my end, mysterious days where MailChimp didn’t seem to check the feed, and there were other quirks — and even working with MailChimp support I couldn’t get things to a stable state. I also didn’t like that MailChimp’s system forced me to pick a top-of-the-hour time during the day when the feed would be checked, and if for some reason it was missed, I had to reconfigure the whole campaign to get the message out.

I needed a better way.

The resulting method that’s been working for almost a year now is to initiate and send the Mailchimp campaign directly from within WordPress. I get full control of scheduling, message generation and formatting. I can re-run the campaign send if I need to. And it has worked reliably every day. Here’s how I set it up (with inspiration from this blog post by Isabel Castillo).

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