Post notification¶
Newsletter → Configuration → Modules → Post notification
A published post becomes a newsletter — immediately, or collected as a digest: one mail that gathers several posts. New in 2.0, in both packages.
The principle: the module sends nothing¶
It creates a perfectly ordinary newsletter and hands it to the normal sending process. Everything else is done by the existing chain.
That is the most important property of this feature, because everything else follows from it:
- The notification appears in the newsletter list, in the sending log, in the statistics and in the archive like any other newsletter.
- It takes the same mail route, the same throttling, the same unsubscribe link.
- And: between creation and sending there is a window in which you can still change or delete it.
Two modes¶
Immediately¶
Every published post becomes a newsletter of its own, scheduled for now + delay.
Collected, as a digest¶
The posts accumulate. At the configured time — daily, or once a week — they become one newsletter with every post since the last one, each as a short teaser below the other. If you publish a lot, your readers get one mail on Monday morning instead of five over the week.
At the bottom of the module page you can see which posts are currently waiting.
The settings¶
| Setting | Default | |
|---|---|---|
| When to send | Immediately | Immediately or digest |
| Target groups | — | Without a group nothing is sent |
| Only these categories | — | Nothing selected means: every post |
| Layout | the default layout | The same templates as in the newsletter form |
| Delay in minutes | 15 | See below. 0 means immediately, 1440 at most |
| Subject | New article: %post_title% |
In immediate mode |
| How often | Daily | Daily or weekly (digest only) |
| Weekday | Monday | Only for the weekly digest |
| Time | 08:00 | HH:MM in your website's time zone |
| Digest subject | New articles on %blogname% |
These are replaced in the subject: %post_title% (title of the post),
%blogname% (name of the website) and %anzahl% (number of posts, digest
only).
Without a target group no newsletter is created
Instead a dismissible message appears in the backend saying where to set the recipients. That is the most common reason for „the module does nothing".
The delay¶
That is your window for corrections, not a technical necessity.
A typo in the post, the wrong image, a button pressed too early — without a window that reaches every subscriber, and a sent newsletter cannot be recalled.
During those 15 minutes the newsletter sits in the list as scheduled. You can delete it there, or turn it back into a draft with Cancel sending and edit it.
0 switches the window off. Do not do that.
The delay applies to the digest as well
The digest is not scheduled for the trigger time but likewise for „now + delay". So „08:00" becomes „08:15".
The time is approximate¶
The digest is triggered by the plugin's cron, that is, with the first cron run after the configured time. The cron depends on page views; in practice „08:00" becomes „some time in the hour after 08:00".
If you need it more precisely, set up a real cron job — Sending settings.
When it is not triggered¶
This list is the real value of the module. A module that mails the whole list every time you press save is worse than none.
| Case | Why |
|---|---|
| An import is running | An import publishes hundreds of posts in a loop. Without this brake that would be hundreds of newsletters to the whole list — the most expensive mistake imaginable |
| The post was already published | What is checked is the transition to „published", not the state. Editing a published post triggers nothing |
| A mail already went out for this post | Unpublishing and publishing again does not produce a second one |
| A post type other than „post" | Pages, revisions, attachments, custom post types of other plugins |
| The post is password-protected | The excerpt would be in the mail, the password would not |
| The post is in none of the chosen categories | Without a selection every post counts |
| No group is configured | See above |
Set it up first, publish afterwards
Switch the module on and configure it completely before you publish the next post. And try it out with a test group containing only yourself.
What goes into the mail¶
The teaser, not the whole post: featured image, title, date, excerpt and a read-on link. In a digest, one such block per post, one below the other.
Two reasons:
The full post text could not be held together in Outlook. Blocks, shortcodes and images from other plugins produce HTML the Word engine does not render.
The teaser brings readers onto your website. Which makes all the difference for any later click statistics — and for everything else you want to show them there.
The excerpt is the post's own. If there is none, one is made from the content: shortcodes out, markup out, cut to 55 words. In that order, otherwise the output of a shortcode would end up as text in the mail.
Header, footer and unsubscribe link come from the chosen layout template.
What has to go into your privacy policy¶
Nothing. The module stores nothing personal: a marker on the post and a list of post numbers.
What the newsletter itself collects is listed unchanged under Newsletter → Configuration → Data collected with the core.