Thanks to the great feedback from our previous post…. we’re happy to announce the new default comments template and a few other things. Here are the big improvements which are in Beta 3 and available now on wordpress.org.

Conversational context in email notifications

We made a major improvement that was so simple as to not be obvious: when a new comment is added to a post we show the recent conversation thread right within the email…. leading up to the prompt for the user to reply to add their own. Now when a Postmatic comment arrives in your inbox you’ll know exactly what people are talking about and what you’ll want to say next.

Other highlights of the new commenting template

1. Support for gravatars (even retina ones)
2. Simplified wording and improved typography
3. A nice big obvious prompt inviting replies

Other changes in Beta 3

• We toned down the colors in the text which requires new users to agree to the email…
• We improved the invitation system so that the text box which lets you write a personalized message supports html, paragraphs, etc
• We’ve added support for internationalization. Official French and Spanish translations are forthcoming but we could use your help with other languages. Get in touch.
• You can now disable widgets in the footer of your template. If you wanted to.
• We simplified the settings screen a bit and are working on improving language all around.

Give this template a try – leave a comment!

When running Postmatic and someone leaves a new comment on your site you'll get a notification of the comment as an email. We are working on improving this comment notification template to include more context of the larger conversation.

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That’s the #1 thing we’ve been asked we’ve received since launching our public beta last week. Although we try to cover a lot of the common questions in our FAQ it admittedly can be a little hard to dig around in. We’re working on that. Until then, here are some of the more common questions with the simplest explanations I can muster:

Where does the mail go? Where does it come from? What’s the flow look like? How do you do it?

We built Postmatic to be compatible with any WordPress install, anywhere, on any host. Even the really junky ones. That meant not relying on the outgoing or incoming mail service provided with the hosts. It’s just not reliable. Plus, you’ll get yourself in trouble if you have a lot of subscribers. There are very good reasons not to send your own email if you are sending in quantity. And once you start using Postmatic, you’ll be sending quite a lot.

So we take care of it. We didn’t want to mess around. We want Postmatic to just work for everyone. All email that leaves your site and has to do with Postmatic (new posts, new comment notifications, subscribe notices, unsubscribe notices, etc) is handled by us and sent through Mailgun.

An average outgoing transaction looks like this:

1. You publish a post
2. Postmatic packages your post into your template (filters shortcodes, throws the header on top, widgets on the bottom) and sends it up to our servers to be inlined (so it can look its best in as many email clients as possible). It also sends along a list of all of the email addresses the post needs to be mailed to.
3. Our server creates a message for every one of your subscribers and hands each off to Mailgun.
4. Mailgun delivers it to all the happy inboxes. This all happens very quickly.

And incoming looks like this:

1. A subscriber replies to your post to leave you a comment.
2. Each email sent by our server has a unique reply-to address assigned to it. If you reply to this post right now you’ll see it.
3. That post comes back into Mailgun who in turn hand it off to our server.
4. Our server looks at the reply-to address and figures out which site it belongs to, which post it is a comment on, what comment it is in response to, and what subscriber it came from.
5. Our server then posts the comment back to your blog via the WordPress api. Sounds like magic, right? It’s not. It’s just a lot of hard work 🙂

Do you handle the outgoing mail for my site? Or does my host?

During our public beta (which will probably be through November) we are handling all outgoing and incoming mail for Postmatic-related email. Nothing goes through your web host. We are doing this because email delivery is notoriously difficult to troubleshoot. If we take most of the acronyms (ISP, DNS, SMTP etc) out of the way doing a large-scale test of our infrastructure becomes much easier. Right now if you visit our support site to tell us your post didn’t get delivered we know exactly who to blame. Us!

Will you always handle all of my Postmatic email?

We will always handle incoming mail coming back to your site. We have to in order to process the comments.

When we launch 1.0 we will no longer offer free outgoing mail service. We really wish we could but the cost would be exorbitant. If you are running a small site or are on a quality host and behaving yourself, you shouldn’t have any problems. If you do have problems we will offer very affordable outgoing mail service as part of a paid upgrade (with lots of other cool features such as analytics and support for post attachments). Once we see how the numbers shake out we’ll come up with the most obtainable price possible.

So you’ll be taking away my currently free beta period outgoing email service?

Not at all. All beta sites will continue to enjoy free outgoing mail for the duration of our time together. It’ll be our way to say thanks for kicking the tires.

Does Postmatic interfere with other email sent from WordPress?

No. We only send and receive email that has to do with Postmatic. Your other plugins continue sending mail using wp_mail.

Do I have to modify my DNS or make other changes to my site setup?

Absolutely not! Does that sound easy and simple? Installation is just a few clickety-clicks away.

 

 

Installing and configuring Postmatic is pretty straightforward, but we’ve made a new video tutorial to make it even easier.

The videos also give a good walkthrough of some of the more subtle and powerful features.

You can find them over here.

We built Postmatic to be a smooth running engine of engagement. We want to increase accessibility, bring more readers into the fold, and help make your content more available to a larger audience.

Email – The Original Push Notificaiton

The inbox should not be underestimated. Email is the original push notification. For many, it is their only passive way of receiving online content. It’s an incredible tool.

Postmatic takes advantage of our learned behavior by getting your content instantly delivered onto anything a reader might have access to: a junky computer at the library, their locked-down PC at work, their mobile device, their old AOL account, or even their Mailstation.

Email in a World of “Inbox Zero.”

Yes, you can learn to be an Email Ninja, keep your inbox at zero unread emails, and still be productive.

What’s curious is that every piece of replacement software we seem to build to eliminate email either needs our email to verify, sign up, or actually sends us a notification in email. How much sense does that make?

We have a love-hate relationship with email. It’s the way we’ve been communicating in the business world since the early 90’s and though we have phone calls (we follow up with emails) and stand up meetings (we follow up with email status reports), and Slack (which sends us email notifications), we simply cannot leave email altogether.

So why build a commenting system based upon email? Easy: accessibility and muscle memory. We worked with nonprofits and knew another solution had to exist (more on that here).

How much is engagement worth to you?

Our pricing is more than fair. When you look at Software as a Service (SaaS) and the business value of it (Bridget wrote about her online expenses here), we come in right at market value.

You could increase your engagement with your audience (like Danny Brown did), build loyalty, and increase sales for only $20 per month. The best part is, if you’re unhappy, you can cancel anytime. Unlike many SaaS models, we actually allow you to pay monthly, not just amortize the annual cost in a sales pitch.

So, what are you waiting for? Start. Start today. Start now.

Our pilot projects have shown that the idea works: we’re seeing levels of engagement from people which have never before left a comment on a blog – and certainly haven’t taken part in complete online discussions. It’s interesting. We’re quite popular with the older crowd. A lot of people don’t realize they are even interacting with a blog but since it just works the conversation flows naturally.. all the while happening in two places at once. One of our Vernal clients that does excellent work on food safety just saw their comments per post jump from 2-3 all the way to 60+.

And now we’re ready to take on more

We’ve gone through enough testing to feel confident that we’re ready to take on a few hundred thousand sites. And we’re very happy to announce that we are now available for download directly from your WordPress dashboard or in the wordpress.org repository.

Please do this one thing:

Our greatest challenge right now is to try to stand out in the huge world that is the WordPress ecosystem. Once we get traction I have no doubt we’ll take off… but we are trying to get our head above water. Could you do me this one favor and tweet about Postmatic?