Support for oEmbed

Embedding audio, video, or documents into blog posts has gotten easier in recent years with the introduction of oEmbed. Specifically in WordPress-powered blogs you can, for example, insert a youtube video by just placing the url to the video on a single line in your post.

Previous to Beta 12 (which is available now) we didn’t do the best job displaying embedded content. Sometimes the url would be present, sometimes not. We knew we could do better.

Now when you embed content from any of the sites officially supported by WordPress not only will we display a stylish placeholder which links to the embedded content, but we’ll also take a pretty good guess at what kind of content it is. Is it a video? Show the video placeholder. A document? Show the document placeholder.

Now you can include content from Youtube, Vimeo, Blip.tv, Meetup, Scribd, Flickr, Hulu, Issue, Soundcloud and more right in your posts…. and your emails. Here’s a youtube video to show you how it works:

Introducing our Concierge service

Our beta program has been a fantastic success. In fact, we’re happy to say we’ll be launching 1.0 in the first half of January. For the first week of that month the team will be getting together (for the very first time!) in Reno (home to Dylan) to put the finishing touches on the service and hit the switch.

One thing we noticed though is that there are gazillions of people which requested api keys but never got around to actually using them and trying things out. We don’t want it to be that way so we decided to offer to do the work. We now have a limited-availability concierge program for any existing key holders which haven’t had the time to get Postmatic up and running on their site. We’re accepting applications now. If you are on the fence and need a little help let us know.

And some improved support offerings

We already feel pretty great about the level of support we’ve been offering but we decided to make things even easier for our users. In beta 12 you’ll find lots of support resources baked right into the plugin options in Settings > Postmatic. It looks like this:

 

You can now easily find our widget directory, the new and improved knowledge base, as well as easily submit a support ticket.

Next stop Reno and 1.0

I’m so excited to get together with Ankur and Dylan next month in the offices of the beautiful Reno Collective (where Dylan hacks away while his wife Ann manages). We’ll be launching Postmatic for the entire WordPress community to use for free as well as unveiling our first premium services…. which are pretty fantastic indeed. Have a great holiday and we’ll see you next year!

The goodness keeps on coming. Beta 4 is available now and brings with it a couple of big features.

Support for Custom Post Types

Postmatic is nice for sending blog posts, but what  about new product notifications from Woocommerce? Or press releases? Now you can choose however many post types you want and Postmatic will send them out. We don’t yet support individual subscriber lists for individual post types but maybe we will in the future. That way you could have one group of subscribers you send blog posts to (yay grandma!) and another set of subscribers that just want to receive new FAQ posts. We’re still feeling out if there is demand for that… so let me know.

Subscriber Management

We’re introducing version 1 of our subscriber management system. From the native WordPress users screen you can now see which of your users are subscribed to which authors, discussions, or post types. This view should give you a better feel for your audience and also lays the groundwork for future enhancements.

We’ve yet to decide how to best handle user exports. There are already so many user export plugins available (most of which will work with Postmatic right out of the box) that we could just rely on them. Or maybe we write our own which only exports Postmatic data. Any thoughts on that?

Other Changes

There are some other little bugs taken care of in this release. You can read about them in the changelog on wordpress.org. Why the bear? Well. She’s cute. That’s all.