Jetpack is the most commonly used post and comment subscriptions plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. That’s why we’re making an easy way for folks to migrate their Jetpack subscribers to Postmatic. And starting today we need a few volunteers to help make sure we got it right.
If you are already running Postmatic but previously used Jetpack you’ll be able to dig up those old subscribers and introduce them to the new crowd.
Or if you have been on the fence and wanting to move to email commenting, but not wanting to leave your current users behind….. the day has come. I hope you are excited as we are. Below you’ll find a mini FAQ with details on what we need help on and how to get started.
How to get started
Is it okay to call a software release an alpha beta? Because that’s what we’re doing. We aren’t releasing the Jetpack importer to all of our Beta testers without testing it on a few more hosting environments.
If you are interested in testing out the Jetpack importer let us know by using this form. We’ll then send you an alpha version of beta 6 (i love that part) for private testing before we release it to all beta users.
What are the risks?
There are none that we have identified. The importer does not send any alerts or notifications to your users. Everything happens in the background. If something fails, it’ll do so quietly and without blowing up a few thousand inboxes.
What do you need me to look out for?
Our primary goal is to test this on sites with more than 500 subscribers. Even better would be a site with tens of thousands.
When you perform the import there isn’t a whole lot that can go wrong. We suspect that if you have more than 10,000 or so subscribers you will get a message that the script timed out. What you should do in that case is just restart the import again and it will pick up from where it left off. Duplicates are handled with grace. It’s safe to run more than once.
Other than that, just check to see that the numbers match up. How many Jetpack subscribers did you have? And now how many Postmatic subscribers do you have? If the math works we’re happy. And you will be too.
What kind of subscribers are imported?
People who have subscribed to new posts on your site will be imported. At this time it’s not going to be in the cards to import people that have subscribed only to comments on individual posts. Maybe WordPress will open their api a little bit in the future to make that possible. We’re hoping so.
Who isn’t imported?
Jetpack supports two kinds of users: people that subscribe to your site with their email address, and people that subscribe to your site with their wordpress.com user identity. At this time we can’t access the email address of a user which subscribed with their wordpress.com identity. This will in most cases be a very small percentage of your audience.
Let’s get started
If you are interested in testing out the Jetpack importer let us know by using this form. We’ll then send you an alpha version of beta 6 (i love that part) for private testing before we release it to all beta users.