Tag: plugin

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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New WordPress and WooCommerce plugin: Harmonizely Booking Product

I’ve released a new, free plugin for WordPress and WooCommerce, Harmonizely Booking Product. The plugin creates a new WooCommerce product type that allows you to sell access to scheduled appointments on your calendar, using Harmonizely.

Here’s a quick video to show you how it works:

Disclaimer: I am not affiliated with Harmonizely and they did not ask or pay me to create this plugin, I’m just a fan of the service who wanted to create more ways to use it within the WordPress ecosystem. This post does contain some referral links where I may receive a small percentage of any sales that might result from readers clicking through.

There are a growing number of options to handle appointment scheduling, and if you’re in some field where people schedule things with you a lot (consultant, agency, counselor, accountant, lawyer, healthcare professional) I hope you’re looking at those tools to save you some time. One of the main reasons I like and settled on Harmonizely is because they support the open CalDAV standard for calendar connections and syncing, where as many other services only support Google Calendar or other proprietary connections. (This is especially important to me as a part of advocating for an open web.)

I also like Harmonizely because the service is simple and fast, they regularly release improvements and new features, they have a small and responsive team, and they’ve made their product roadmap public and interactive. Their basic tool is free and they have very affordable pricing for an upgraded version.

Creating this plugin to work with WooCommerce means that anyone who has an existing WooCommerce-powered store can add booking functionality in and keep using their existing payment methods, plugins and other settings. I can imagine a content creator who already sells access to video courses or other educational resources might enjoy being able to let users schedule a quick call with them for a small fee, too. Or maybe someone who offers troubleshooting services of some kind can now give their customers a quick way to pay for and schedule an appointment. There are lots of possibilities, and WooCommerce offers tons of flexibility so you can integrate with Stripe, Paypal, Square and other payment processors.

If you want to sell access to your time through a website, I hope you’ll take a look at Harmonizely, WooCommerce, and this new Harmonizely Booking Product plugin. If you have questions or need help, you can submit a support message or open a GitHub issue.

Enjoy!