With the big news of Epoch on Thursday (and specifically the WP Tavern article in the afternoon) came a ton of interest in that plugin as well as Postmatic. It was fantastic but exhausting. So this post is going out a day late. Sorry!
First a recap of what the big features in 1.4 are
- Postmatic Optins add intelligent forms to your site to turn visitors into subscribers
- Skimlinks integration brings monetization opportunities directly to the inbox
- Take advantage of the best social sharing plugin available with Social Warfare
- Epoch + Postmatic 1.4 bring realtime native commenting to WordPress. With email replies.
What is left for discovery in the upcoming Postmatic 1.4
This post will focus on all of the little tweaks and details. It’s for the enthusiasts. Here goes….
New widget options and variety
Postmatic Premium users can place 3 widgets in the footer of their new post notification emails. Now, in 1.4, you can set an entirely different set of widgets to display in comment notifications. One set for posts. One set for comments. This will make it nice to put more comment-specific widgets (latest comments, top commenters, active topics) where they belong.
Updated disclaimer language
We’ve tweaked the language shown in the email templates which invites the user to reply. It used to be Your comment will be published publicly and immediately on site_name but now reads a more gentle You’re invited to respond by replying to this email. If you do, it may be published immediately or held for moderation, depending on the comment policy of site_name.
Subscribe widget modifications
With the introduction of Postmatic Optins we’ve simplified our native subscribe widget. To that end we’ve removed unsubscribe options from the widget. Users can still unsubscribe via emails.
Improvements to the Mailchimp importer
The Mailchimp importer has been improved with more reliability and more graceful failure notices.
Support for subscribe/unsubscribe commands in the email subject
Some people get confused when trying to subscribe or unsubscribe to a site and place the word ‘agree’ or ‘unsubscribe’ in the email subject instead of the body. Now we’ll accept it.
Tons of performance improvements
We’re halfway through rebuilding our api (which serves as the layer between your site and our mail servers) to be faster and smarter. The first steps in our departure from a reliance on wp_cron are now in place. We’ll be able to sever any dependencies on wp_cron in the upcoming 1.5.
Postmatic 1.4 will be available on Monday
We’re testing 1.4 with a few sites right now and a couple more tweaks need to be made. We’ll hit those Monday morning and let you know when it has shipped.
Off we go to 1.5…
Things here may be quiet again for a while. We’re going to be keeping our heads down pushing hard on 1.5. It has a codename you may love: Digests. But not like you’ve ever seen them.