Category: Updates

November 5, 2015

We’ve finally found a great use for social networks

We are huge fans of the kind of deep, thoughtful, and exploratory conversations that happen on blogs and over email. Social media doesn’t really do it for most of the team here… and we certainly question the usefulness of 140 character comments. We maintain a company Twitter account for helping with support, but otherwise we stick to the inbox and comments section for the sharing of ideas.

But so many people have accounts on social networks that we couldn’t help but put some thought into how to leverage that….

Say hello to Postmatic Social Commenting

Postmatic Social Commenting lets your users authenticate using their existing accounts when leaving a comment. It’s a quick and simple way to fill out the comment form with a single click. We’ll grab their name, email address, and profile URL. That leaves them free to focus on what’s important: the conversation.

We’re starting with support for four networks:

WordPress.com
Twitter
Google Plus
Facebook

The plugin adds subtle social icons to your comment form and is completely integrated with Postmatic and Epoch.

Hasn’t this been done before?

When we created Epoch we searched around. High and low. There just aren’t any well maintained or highly reviewed plugins that offer the speed and simplicity we were looking for. And that’s because they all focus on the same thing: social login. That’s not what we want. Why the login part?

Don’t call it social login. This is social commenting.

WordPress Social Login, OneAll Social Login, miniOrange, and other existing social commenting plugins all have the same thing in common: they are focused on letting your users log into your site using a social account. That comes with a whole lot of overhead. So now users are going to see an admin bar? Can they reach the back end of the site? Do they need to maintain a profile? The list goes on.

We’re doing it better. Just authenticate, grab some data, and run. Light, fast, and easy. We hope you enjoy it.

Postmatic Social Commenting is free and available in the WordPress repo. Download it today.

October 20, 2015

Let’s talk Postmatic 2.0

Two years ago we began development on Postmatic. We knew that email commenting was going to be a big piece of the engagement picture but have always wanted the product to be so much more. As we close in on Postmatic 2.0 the product has finally reached the heights we’ve always dreamed of.

There is a lot to talk about and we’ll be blogging about it here over the next month or two. There isn’t a projected release date yet, but if you are interested in being a beta tester please let us know via the usual support channels.

Let’s start with a tiny feature that is going to do a lot to change how you interact with comments via email.

Meet the Reply via email button

In most emails sent via Postmatic you will find a recap of the conversation surrounding the post, or the larger context of the conversation. It’s one of our users favorite parts of Postmatic – being able to catch up on the full conversation right from email. It looks a lot like this:

Replying to that email would send a reply to Danny Brown. But what if you want to reply to Noelle? You can in Postmatic 2.0.

It looks a bit like this

You’ll notice there is now a Reply via email button after each comment. Clicking it will spawn a new compose window in your email client. Add your thoughts, hit send, done. The comment will inject into the proper point in the conversation and notifications will be sent out to all subscribers. Awesome.

We are adding the Reply via email button to all comments across all views in Postmatic Premium. It’s especially useful in circumstances when there are a lot of comments to catch up on such as when a user first subscribes to an older post or receives a recap when rejoining a busy conversation after a few days:

We think it’s a little touch that will add a lot of comments.

There is so much to talk about in 2.0. We’ll be trickling out more posts as soon as features are wrapped up and production ready. Stay tuned. And, by all means, if there is something you’d like to see in 2.0 please let us know in the comments.

October 1, 2015

Postmatic for Gravity Forms is here

Gravity Forms is one of the most advanced forms creation and management plugins for WordPress. People use it for all sorts of things: contact forms, surveys, order forms, directories, and mailing list signup forms.

Jeff Matson, part of the team at RocketGenius (the folks that make Gravity Forms), cooked up a beautifully simple plugin to integrate Postmatic with your existing Gravity forms.

Things you can do with Postmatic + Gravity Forms

Let people subscribe to your site when they are filling out your contact form

Easy. They’ve already give you their email address. One more checkbox and they’re on your list.

Create your own 100% customized subscribe widget

Create a new Gravity Form and use the native Gravity widget to stick it in your sidebar or footer.

Create a signup form to let people choose to subscribe to posts as they happen (Postmatic) or a digest (through Mailchimp or Aweber).. or both.

Already sending a weekly newsletter but also want to let users subscribe to posts via Postmatic? This is the one for you. Give your users a choice.

Let customers join your list when purchasing a product

If you are using Gravity Forms for simple ecommerce, make sure you grab that subscription at the point of sale.

There are so many ways to capture subscribers in Postmatic that we’ve compiled a full list of them for you here.

Get started

We’ve created a tutorial on how to get started with Gravity Forms. You can find it on our support site or in the new help area of Settings > Postmatic.

Gravity Forms (premium) joins Caldera Forms (free) to nicely round out the form packages that support Postmatic. Thanks, Jeff!

September 29, 2015

A big week for updates and comment moderation

This week has seen a flurry of releases with updates to Postmatic, Epoch, as well as Crowd Control. Here’s a quick recap of the best of what’s new.

Get access to support from right inside Postmatic

We maintain a lot of documentation, tutorials, and faqs over at http://docs.gopostmatic.com.
Starting today all of these resources are available right inside your WordPress dashboard. Just visit Settings > Postmatic and look for the orange help button in the lower-right corner. If you don’t find what you need you can submit a ticket as well.

Nice integration between Postmatic, Epoch, and Crowd Control

Last week we released a little plugin named Crowd Control. It lets you rope in your readers to help with comment moderation so you can, say, go on vacation. When a comment has been flagged enough times by your readers it is sent back to moderation and you’ll get an email notice about it. With Crowd Control 1.0.1 these emails are sent through Postmatic where you can then take action (trash, spam, reply) right from your inbox.

Users of Epoch will also get some improved styling when running Crowd Control. We have even more planned on this front. Stay tuned.

Front end comment moderation comes to Epoch

This was release last week as well, but the 1.0.7 release that shipped today really wraps it up. WordPress users with the ability to moderate comments can now do so from the front end of the site using Epoch. It’s lightning fast but also very convenient: moderating comments is much easier when you can see them in context. Have a look in this screencast.

Speaking of comment moderation…

There is a new plugin on the scene that we helped build with Stephen Cronin called Show Parent Comment. For those of you that like to moderate your comments from your WordPress dashboard you’re going to check it out.

Show Parent Comment solves an old problem in a simple way: when moderating comments in WordPress it’s impossible to know what the comment was in reply to. Here’s how it looks with Show Parent Comment enabled:

The parent comment is placed above the reply, styled with blockquotes, and expand/contractible to save space. Very simple.

Another interesting Postmatic integration just dropped in the plugin repo so I need to get started on the next post announcing that one! More tomorrow.

September 23, 2015

Need help with comment moderation? Meet Crowd Control.

Comment moderation can be a drag. On larger sites it can even be a part time job. While WordPress has some pretty useful moderation rules available nothing beats human intelligence.

If you have lots of comments it probably means you have lots of commenters. Let’s put some of those extra brains to work.

Today we release Crowd Control. It’s free and available now in the WordPress repository.

Crowd Control modifies your comment area to add a little box to the top of each comment. Users can report comments as inappropriate with a quick click. When a comment has been reported as offensive by a couple of people (you can set the threshold) it’ll be sent back to moderation and we’ll notify you via email.

Under the hood there is a lot of intelligence and security checks keeping people from abusing the system and burying comments just to be mean.

It’s pretty simple but like a lot of things relating to WordPress commenting – it hasn’t been done right before. We’re willing to take the gamble that it is needed.

Go ahead and take a vacation

Let your users keep your comments area clean while you are gone. That’s why we called it Crowd Control.

We have lots of great ideas of where we can take this next, and you can get involved on Github. Crowd Control is already integrated into Epoch but soon it’ll be so in an even smoother way. The same goes for Postmatic integration. The moderation emails sent from Crowd Control aren’t the same beautiful (and replyable) ones that you get from Postmatic Premium but we’ll fix that up in a jiffy. Give it a week.

Download Crowd Control from http://wordpress.org/plugins/crowd-control.

September 17, 2015

How Danny Brown increased blog engagement by 210% over 7 months by using Postmatic.

Danny Brown told us he was writing a piece about Postmatic to be featured on WPKube. He said there would be some charts.

We thought oooh charts.

What we saw next made the whole team here prouder than you could know.

As you can see, in the seven months prior to installing Postmatic, my comment count per month averaged 149 comments per month. In the seven months since implementing Postmatic, that jumps to 312.

That’s more than doubled my average comment count!

Danny Brown via WPKube

Comment growth on http://dannybrown.me since installing Postmatic.

That chart is a reflection of the success of Postmatic. It’s proof that what we are doing works, and people love it. I couldn’t be more inspired. I’ve printed it out and stuck it to the wall.

Help us spread the message

As a startup these numbers mean the world to us – because we made it happen. We set out to do something and have found success in it:

Danny Brown increased blog engagement by 210% over 7 months by using Postmatic.Click To Tweet

And read it for yourself

Danny’s piece provides the big picture of what you can do with Postmatic. He’s clearly figured out how to leverage our technology for huge gains on his own sites.

Head over to WPKube to check it out and leave a comment. Maybe he’ll share his secrets.

September 9, 2015

What’s new in Postmatic and Epoch

There have been a lot of nice features in Postmatic 1.4.3-1.4.4 and Epoch 1.0.2-1.0.4 that you might not know about. Here’s a quick recap.

Let’s start with Postmatic’s new features:

A nice update for Jetpack sharing

We’ve done a lot of work to make the Jetpack icon-only mode render nicely in new post notifications. Here they are in all their glory:

Between Jetpack (free) and Social Warfare (premium) there is now a colorful social sharing solution for everyone. The icons look great on desktop and in mobile email clients that support mobile-specific css. In mobile email clients that do not support background scaling the non-retina versions will display and look a little less than awesome. Sorry.

Subscription Language Customization

You can now configure the Participate in this conversation via email language that is located under the comment form. Here’s an example of the form with the default language:

To change the content of this text, go to Settings > Postmatic in your WordPress dashboard. Click on the Options tab. Scroll down until you see Comment form opt-in text.

Change the text to whatever you like, then scroll down and click on the Save Changes button. Your comments form will now show the updated language.

Simplified Subscription Emails

The language in our subscription emails has been streamlined, which makes the confirmation process much clearer. We moved all of the disclaimer language to the individual comment templates – where it really matters. This makes getting new subscribers in the door even easier.

What’s new in Epoch?

Post Author Comment Styling

We’ve added special styling for comments left by the blog post author. As you can see in the example below, the comment left by Jason is enclosed in a grey box because he is the author of the post.

Epoch now styles comments by the post author in a unique way.

Added Support for Simple Comment Editing

We now support Simple Comment Editing, a plugin with which one can give users the ability to edit and/or delete their comments within 5 minutes of posting. It’s fantastic and kind of magical.

Better notifications of comments in moderation

New in Epoch 1.0.4 are improved notifications of when your comment is being held for moderation. Moderated comments are grayed out and a special status icon lets you know in a glance.

A pending comment in Epoch.

Work is coming along nicely on version 2.0 and on our next plugin: Postmatic Social. Stay tuned!