Facilitating better online discussions is at the center of what we are doing with Postmatic. As we participate more and more in conversation on sites which are running our beta it has become clear that while our template is great for new post notifications the comment-notification templates were much too busy and provided more information than was needed.
We have redesigned the comment templates with a focus on who said what, and why. We did a ton of work on improving comment context, reducing the size of the header so scrolling isn’t needed to see what is new, and making it even clearer to just hit reply.
Here is a side-by-side of the new comments template
The new template uses a simple site name as well as favicon (sniffed out by the wonderful grabicon.com) in place of the larger site header image. It also provides a ton of context further down the message in case the comment comes in a few months after the discussion as ended. Down below you’ll see the post title, featured image, excerpt, and then a recap of the conversation up to that point.
The conversation recap is intelligent and does a good job of pinpointing exactly what was being discussed (taking into account parent comments vs inline comments, and its place within the larger flow of things). It was a bear to make but like all of this: very much worth the trouble.
Better subjects for smarter sorting and filtering
Email subjects have gotten smarter. When a user receives a comment notification the subject will clue them in as to if it is a new top-level comment, a reply to a comment by someone else, or a reply to a comment they themselves wrote. This helps Gmail and others group the conversations more intelligently and also provides at-a-glance context of it that particular email is worth opening.
Postmatic gets better every day because of our users.
Most all of these great improvements came to us from a few incredible conversations on two of our beta sites. They were really quite amazing to participate in. It seems that giving people an easy way to discuss your product really gets them talking. The openness and generosity shown to us was really humbling. Thanks again, everyone.
Beta 17 is available in the WordPress repo now. We hope you love it.