Many little improvements showed up today with the release of beta 14.

A fully translated experience

Since launching our beta program we’ve noticed that we are pretty popular in Europe. Go figure. Maybe there is a deeper appreciation of the written word? Or a preference for the slower pace of email? We’re not yet sure…. but as of today all plugin functions, templates, and emails are fully translated into three major European languages: French, Spanish, and German. That should keep Europe and large parts of South and Central America nicely covered. We’re moving forward on Chinese next. If you’d like to see Postmatic in your language please let us know…. or even volunteer to help out.

Shout out to Languages by Laura (an early beta tester) for extraordinary translations at a very fair price.

Lending a hand for fighting spam

As we’ve mentioned in the past, we think a lot about spam. Daily. In every line of code we write. And try as we may we just can’t agree with the popular notion that WordPress has a spam problem. It doesn’t. But what it does have is a user-education problem.

There are so many very well built tools to stop spam. But the nature of things is that the landscape is ever changing. A plugin that worked well in 2013 might have been defeated by 2014. We’re happy to keep an eye on that and make anti-spam recommendations both on our support site and now directly within wp-admin.

Our current recommended setup involves a front-end as well as back-end approach. The front-end intercepts bots using javascript so comments never even get submitted, and the back-end uses crowdsourced knowledge to intercept comments that may be porky.

From our support article on the subject:

1. Install Goodbye Captcha or WP-SpamShield. These plugins make it quite difficult for spambots to even submit a spammy comment on your site. They are fantastic.
2. Use a spam filtering service such as Akismet or CleanTalk.
   Akismet comes bundled with every WordPress install and is free to use for non-commericial use. In our 10 years of WordPress experience it has proven time and again to do an extremely good job of marking suspect comments as spam. And it keeps getting better every year. If a comment does get by WordPress Zero Spam then Akismet should take care of it pretty handily. If you use it please do consider making a donation.

Starting with beta 14, if we detect that you are not running both a front-end and back-end spam solution, we’ll throw a notice on the top of the Postmatic Settings screen and provide handy links to get up and running. Done.

The title of the post links to the post url on new post notifications.

It’s a little bit of an easter egg but what it means is that if you get the email and want to view the post online without scrolling to the bottom… you can now do so.

We made our support for embeds even better

In beta 12 we introduced support for the oembed standard. This was a good start. An embed would intelligently be replaced by a placeholder showing a video, audio, or document icon which, when clicked, would bring the user to the online version of the post. But what if clicking that YouTube placeholder image actually brought you to the video? Or if you were on your phone, how about it launches the YouTube app and starts playing the video? Now they do.. and the same is true for Vimeo, Soundcloud, Blip, or any other embedded content. It’s pretty fantastic on mobile.

We now support the wp-gist plugin.

This one is kind of geeky but we needed to make it work. We were delighted back in November when Tom McFarlin announced he was going to switch to Postmatic to power his post notifications and email commenting. Tom is a well known and highly respected WordPress developer. Someday I’ll write a full post about all of the lessons we’ve learned by powering his site and technology stack (it involves a lot of ssl battles and wp-cron wrangling).

This time around we wanted to do something simple to support Tom. We noticed he frequently offers code samples in his posts.. which he powers with the wp-gist plugin. Since we strip shortcodes out by default, these nice samples were not visible in the email versions of his posts. We cooked up support for wp-gist in beta 14 and are happy to have his wonderful snippets land in our inboxes every morning. Thanks, Tom!

If you have a favorite shortcode you would like to have supported in Postmatic please let us know.

A few small changes

• We added support to invite existing WordPress users to become subscribers. If you have legacy users and would like to invite them to subscribe to post notifications you can now do so.
• Users can now subscribe to all site comments directly from their profile page. This is especially handy for folks using Postmatic to power a community discussion site.

Why do you think Postmatic is so popular in Europe? Any theories?

A few weeks ago we introduced support for magically transforming your Jetpack users into native WordPress subscribers with Postmatic subscriptions. Today we do the same for Mailpoet users.

Mailpoet is a WordPress plugin which allows you to send email newsletters (including new posts notifications) directly from your WordPress dashboard. In it are lists. In the lists are subscribers. We like subscribers. If you are a Mailpoet user and would like to turn your Mailpoet subscribers into Postmatic subscribers you can do that with a single click starting right now. You can run both plugins in tandem if you like, but we don’t recommend using both for sending new post notifications.

An eye on security and privacy

There’s a reason that of the 20,000 or so emails that have been sent through our system during our beta period there have been only 4 spam complaints filed against us. Four! With this new importer we are continuing our tradition of being sticklers about spam. As in we won’t let it happen.

Here’s the deal. It’s kind of long winded.

We are making lots of ways to bring your community with you when you install Postmatic. Our invitation system, the widget, Jetpack and now Mailpoet are the first batch. There’s a few more in the pipeline as well. In all of these we want it to be easy for you and safe for your users. And what that comes down to is that we won’t make it possible for anyone, ever, to be subscribed to your site without having opted in. They could have opted in on Mailpoet 2 years ago. Great. We can use that. Or maybe they opted in via Jetpack. Awesome. Good for you, and good for your users.

How this shakes out with Mailpoet is a bit different than Jetpack. Jetpack does not allow you to bulk import subscribers to your site. It just doesn’t exist. The only way for people to subscribe is to fill out a form, then click a link in an email confirming they really wanted to join up. Getting a clean list of approved users from Jetpack is easy.

Mailpoet lets you import any users you want without them having to agree. It’s not as if they follow a more loose standard than any other newsletter service. Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Campaign Monitor… they all do the same. I guess it’s how the newsletter sector rolls. And maybe it’s ok for newsletters because they are a one-way transaction. But we don’t do one-way and the WordPress community has a large enough problem with spam. If we aren’t careful Postmatic could make that a lot worse. We’re going to keep it clean and make sure everyone that uses Postmatic gets the highest possible delivery rates and lowest possible spam scores.

So here is how we’ll handle imports from Mailpoet

You can import your Mailpoet lists in a single click, but here is the limitation: We will not import any Mailpoet subscribers unless the following two conditions are true:

1. The user has opened an email you sent through Mailpoet: This first check makes sure the user has at least taken the time to open at least one email sent to them via Mailpoet. This isn’t enough though as it is possible to open an email just for the sake of figuring out how to unsubscribe. That brings us to #2.
2. The user has clicked a link within an email you sent through Mailpoet: If this condition is true as well then we consider them someone that probably likes your content. And no, clicking on the unsubscribe link doesn’t count 😛

When a Mailpoet import is initialized we will comb through the list, make sure all of the above is true for each user, and then leave the rest.

But here is something neat

We don’t want to leave anybody behind. Maybe someone did really want to subscribe but never actually clicked a link in an email. That happens. What Postmatic will do is let you send an invitation to the remaining users asking them to opt-in to your blog. You can personalize it and the whole deal. It uses our inviter… which people really love.

If we did not hold ourselves to a higher standard our import would allow unwilling users to be imported into Postmatic. And then they would spam or be spammed or any combination of things. Nobody wants that. Plus, if a subscriber does not open or interact with your emails maybe they aren’t all that good of a match anyway, right? Think of it as spring cleaning 🙂

Other changes in beta 10

1. We put the view this post online button back on new post notifications. By request. From many of you 🙂
2. We also added links to view the post online in comment notification emails.
3. We fixed problems with the French and Spanish translations not registering properly.
4. There is now improved styling of this content not available online notifications. These are the notices that show up if a shortcode or some advanced html is used in your post. They keep inboxes from blowing up.

Enjoy!

We just pulled off threaded commenting.

I’m so proud of our team for this. We just brought Postmatic, and your blog if you are running it, to a whole new level.

Sometimes called nested commenting, or inline replies… but officially called threaded (nested) in the WordPress backend. Instead of comments being limited to a single stream or conversation you allow your users to reply to each other as well as the post itself.

Here are the two side-by-side:

This style of commenting does big things for helping users keep track of conversations within the larger framework of the post. Users can go off on tangents, reply directly to one another, and suddenly a single conversation can bloom into dozens.

We initially had decided not to support threaded commenting in our 1.0 release. In our early planning we were coming at it the wrong way and really hadn’t been able to nail it. It was confusing to know when you were replying to an existing comment versus leaving a new comment. You don’t get many interface options in email, and we want this whole thing to be perfectly simple.

After talking to 3 different fellow WordPress developers, all of whom we greatly admire (please! more of this! get in touch!), we came up with some ideas of how to pull it off. We spent the last four days retooling and i’m happy to say we got it right. So, starting with Beta 8 (available now) we will indeed have a 100% email experience for posting, reading, and replying to comments. It’s totally intuitive and now that it is done everything feels so much better.

How to turn it on

There’s not much you need to do. Postmatic will follow the lead of what you have already defined for your blog in Settings > Discussion. Turn on threaded commenting there and we’ll do the rest.

Give it a try

Threaded commenting is available right now on this very site. Give it a try by hitting reply or leaving a comment below. Nonsense comments accepted for the sake of science.

That’s all for now

We’re getting pretty close to declaring this thing 1.0. We have one more big feature in the works as well as few more importers to cook up. More next week. Have a great holiday.

Beta 6 was released last night with a focus on moving users around and making webmail clients happy.

Welcome Jetpack Users!

Migrating your users from Jetpack to Postmatic takes only seconds. We’ve built a safe and secure importer which will copy over all of your new post notification Jetpack subscribers with a single click. Once the import has completed you can safely disable Jetpack Subscriptions and continue on doing what you do best. Your Jetpack subscribers will be left in tact should you ever need to access them again.

This is the first of three importers which we’ll be releasing in the next few weeks. We’ll let you guess which other services are next.

Exporting users just got easier

After getting some great feedback from our beta testers we decided we should go ahead and build our own native Postmatic exporter which will allow you to export your users along with their subscription preferences. And that’s what we’ve done. You’ll see a new button at the bottom of your users screen in WordPress which will let you download a csv. Click it. Done.

Happier images in Gmail and Yahoo Mail

We finally squished a bug which keeps large images from blowing out the email template in some versions of Gmail and Yahoo Mail. At this time there are no known bugs regarding images in any email client. Let us know otherwise.

Support for a few more 3rd party plugins

By default we filter shortcodes and replace their output with a nice message saying view this content online. That’s because more often than not a shortcode will pull in a snippet of code that in no way is going to hold up well in a variety of email clients. Things like iframes. Or javascript.

We do, however, whitelist shortcodes which output content that works well in email. With this release we are introducing support for shortcodes from two plugins: NextGen Gallery and Types. These were requested by beta users and making them happen wasn’t so hard. If you need us to support a shortcode that use frequently use get in touch.

Jetpack is the most commonly used post and comment subscriptions plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. That’s why we’re making an easy way for folks to migrate their Jetpack subscribers to Postmatic. And starting today we need a few volunteers to help make sure we got it right.

If you are already running Postmatic but previously used Jetpack you’ll be able to dig up those old subscribers and introduce them to the new crowd.

Or if you have been on the fence and wanting to move to email commenting, but not wanting to leave your current users behind….. the day has come. I hope you are excited as we are. Below you’ll find a mini FAQ with details on what we need help on and how to get started.

How to get started

Is it okay to call a software release an alpha beta? Because that’s what we’re doing. We aren’t releasing the Jetpack importer to all of our Beta testers without testing it on a few more hosting environments.

If you are interested in testing out the Jetpack importer let us know by using this form. We’ll then send you an alpha version of beta 6 (i love that part) for private testing before we release it to all beta users.

What are the risks?

There are none that we have identified. The importer does not send any alerts or notifications to your users. Everything happens in the background. If something fails, it’ll do so quietly and without blowing up a few thousand inboxes.

What do you need me to look out for?

Our primary goal is to test this on sites with more than 500 subscribers. Even better would be a site with tens of thousands.

When you perform the import there isn’t a whole lot that can go wrong. We suspect that if you have more than 10,000 or so subscribers you will get a message that the script timed out. What you should do in that case is just restart the import again and it will pick up from where it left off. Duplicates are handled with grace. It’s safe to run more than once.

Other than that, just check to see that the numbers match up. How many Jetpack subscribers did you have? And now how many Postmatic subscribers do you have? If the math works we’re happy. And you will be too.

What kind of subscribers are imported?

People who have subscribed to new posts on your site will be imported. At this time it’s not going to be in the cards to import people that have subscribed only to comments on individual posts. Maybe WordPress will open their api a little bit in the future to make that possible. We’re hoping so.

Who isn’t imported?

Jetpack supports two kinds of users: people that subscribe to your site with their email address, and people that subscribe to your site with their wordpress.com user identity. At this time we can’t access the email address of a user which subscribed with their wordpress.com identity. This will in most cases be a very small percentage of your audience.

Let’s get started

If you are interested in testing out the Jetpack importer let us know by using this form. We’ll then send you an alpha version of beta 6 (i love that part) for private testing before we release it to all beta users.

Photo credit: Karin Dalziel