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Newsletter June ’10

As many of you know this month saw the release of WordPress 3.0. In addition we at Tribulant also managed to get out a major release with Newsletters 3.8 besides the heightened excitement over the FIFA World Cup, life has progress as normal for us at Tribulant.

Other news includes the updating of documentation for each product. While not yet complete this month, We will hopefully complete it during July. New sections are being posted as soon as the update team has finished with a particular section.

Releases and Updates

WordPress Newsletters plugin v3.8 release

New features include:

• Display custom fields in admin notification email sent.
• Upon export, choose whether only active or all subscribers should be exported.
• Check bounced emails button in ‘Subscribers’ section.
• POP/IMAP mailbox bounce feature
• Global email priority setting (High, Normal, Low)
• Delete subscriber on specific bounce count. 1st, 2nd, 3rd bounce.

Improvements include:

• Default theme should be the checked radio button instead of NONE
• When sending first or latest newsletter, the history theme_id should be used rather than the default theme
• When a subscriber unsubscribes its current email(s) in the queue for that list(s) should be removed as well.

Fixes include:

• Input ID and label FOR start with numeric values and cause XHTML validation errors.
• Non-ajax embedded form action URL
• Emails don’t queue when an attachment is added.
• Editing a custom field breaks the slug and the subscribers section.
• Fixes to custom field values, checkboxes and other elements in different sections due to an attribute escape bug.
• Editing a subscriber doesn’t pre-tick its existing lists.
• Return-Path header when using the WP Mail function.
• Checkboxes shortcode for subscribe didn’t work while “multiple” worked.
• Require activation setting didn’t work on subscriptions through the registration form.

WordPress Shopping Cart plugin

We have been working on an update for the WordPress Shopping Cart plugin. Unfortunately we kept on delaying its release as new features were added and improvements were made to the plugin. Please bare with us as we complete the stable release and make it available as soon as possible. We are aiming to have it by Tuesday.

June’s plugin of the month reviewed

Configure SMTP

For those of you who are familiar with the wpPHPMailer plugin Configure SMTP mailing in WordPress, including support for sending e-mail via SSL/TLS (such as GMail). This is an improvement and its release is greatly appreciated by the WordPress community. This plugin has been renamed, rewritten, is an updated version of the wpPHPMailer plugin.

While this plugin may not be need by everybody those who send out information to their users/clients and want and easy way to configure their SMTP features this is the plugin to do the job. Use this plugin to customize the SMTP mailing system used by default by WordPress to handle outgoing e-mails. It offers you the ability to specify:

• SMTP host name
• SMTP port number
• If SMTPAuth (authentication) should be used.
• SMTP username
• SMTP password
• If the SMTP connection needs to occur over ssl or tls

In addition, you can instead indicate that you wish to use GMail to handle outgoing e-mail, in which case the above settings are automatically configured to values appropriate for GMail, though you’ll need to specify your GMail e-mail (included the “@gmail.com”) and password.

Regardless of whether SMTP is enabled or configured, the plugin provides you the ability to define the name and email of the ‘From:’ field for all outgoing e-mails.

A nice feature is the simple test button that allows you to send a test e-mail to yourself to check if sending e-mail has been properly configured for your blog. The installation follows the normal WordPress conventions and is easily done.

Good news is that the Configure SMTP plugin also works great in conjunction with our WordPress Newsletters plugin. You can set the ‘Mail Type’ setting under Newsletters > Configuration of the Newsletters plugin to ‘WP Mail’ then install and activate the Configure SMTP plugin which hooks to the WordPress mail function and handles it from there.

WordPress 3.0

On the 17th June 2010 WordPress release version 3.0. I am not going to go through all the new features but for those of you who would like to read more you can do so here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Version_3.0.

Basically a lot of improvements and thought has gone into the new release with lots of new features and better security. A very useful new feature is the WordPress 3.0 menu system which allows you to manage multiple navigations/menus for your site and easily code them into your WordPress theme. The menu interface allows you to drag and drop custom links, pages, categories, etc into place as you construct your menus with multiple levels.

We have tested our products on our development server and all seems to be working stable under version 3.0. All of our plugins work without any issues noted. As always please remember to test new versions of WordPress on a test server before upgrading your main site especially if you run a commercial blog. If you do find anything specifically related to – or caused by – WordPress 3.0, please let us know.

A little Humour

The Wrap up

Well that’s it for another month. I look forward to hearing from you and don’t forget to send us your site for inclusion in next month’s newsletter. Be safe and be well.