MailPress calls itself “the WordPress mailing platform.” Unfortunately, MailPress didn’t do all we wanted it to — mainly it didn’t have the flexibility I was looking for in a plugin to handle our e-mail edition. Enter WordPress Courier, a plugin I built from scratch aimed directly at managing newspapers’ e-mail editions. One of the things that I enjoyed about College Publisher was its e-mail editions, which were simple to send out yet fairly attractive. Many newspapers have to resort to third-party solutions, such as Constant Contact, to manage their e-mail newsletters. Not only are these e-mails time consuming to put together, they aren’t very attractive, either.
Using Courier, you can make your e-mails as advanced or as simple as you please (see an example here). E-mails are based on templates but each e-mail is easily customized. When you first initiate an e-mail — let’s say you want to send out your daily headlines — a preview is automatically created from your template. In many cases, you can send this e-mail out right away without any changes, but let’s say you want to delete a story from your e-mail — maybe it was already sent out as breaking news — or want to move a story up. Maybe you want to add an editor’s note of modify your nameplate because it’s a holiday. You are presented with the full source code to modify as you wish, and can preview the e-mail as many times as you like before finally sending out the e-mail.
The goal is to find a line between automation and control. In the future, more features will be added to increase your control, such as a text-only edition, advanced analytics and SMS text integration, but not at the expense of simplicity for you, the user.
Tags: CoPress, E-Mail Edition, MailPress, WordPress
