As you may know, the Subscription Option WordPress plug-in as a great way to feed out your blog posts to Facebook, Twitter, RSS, and email. You can follow this link to see more information on this plug-in, and see how it generates configurable icons in your sidebar that allow users to subscribe to your posts.
This post will focus on Subscribe2, a plug-in which also manages subscriptions, and can be conveniently configured to notify subscribers to a blog via email when new content is posted.
Installation and configuration is managed by blog admins. Here are the steps:
1. Activate Subscribe2 like any other WordPress plug-in.
2. Go to your WordPress Dashboard and find the Subscribe2 under the “Settings” tab. Here you will find a variety of settings that handle various occurrences, including new subscribers, new posts, new pages, and un-subscribers. Subscribe2 provides granular control of each of these events for both the admin and the subscriber.
3. Email templates: This step lets you control the text within the emails that will be auto generated and sent, depending upon admin settings and user profiles. There are three types: New Post email, Subscribe/Unsubscribe email, and Reminder email. Admins can control what the email says, and provide additional information from “message substitutions” words – symbols which are auto-rendered when the email is sent. See example of a Subscribe2 template, below.
4. Configure Widgets (optional) – Subscribe2 has two widgets which may be enabled on the “Settings” tab.
Subscribe2 Widget provides non-subscribers a convenient form to type in an email address and click “Subscribe.” A confirmation email is sent, and a click on the url is all that is required to begin the subscription. This option is available to both members and non-members of the Commons. But only group blog members may manage their profiles via the provided url.
Subscribe2 Counter simply displays the current number of subscribers to the blog.
If you want to conveniently manage how subscribers to your blog get notified of new content, check out this robust and highly-configurable plugin.
