About

This site provides information about the latest version of the Subscribe2 HTML plugin for WordPress. Subscribe2 HTML notifies subscribed users each time a new post is made on any blog running the plugin.

The Author

Subscribe2 HTML is developed by one author (me!) for primary use on my own blogs. I am not a professional computer coder, nor am I employed in a line of work relating to computing; this is more of a hobby for me. If this plugin is useful to you then fantastic. If you have suggestions or constructive comments to make please post a comment under the post relating to the most recent version.

I cannot promise to implement your suggestion but I’ll consider all reasonable requests that will also be of benefit on my sites. 🙂

History

Subscribe2 was originally developed by Skippy and was an update of the subscribe plugin by seriocomic.

I started pestering Skippy (real name Scott!) with little issues I was finding while using his plugin and this eventually grew into me beta-testing his new releases and suggesting changes to the code and areas where it could be developed in the future.

Unfortunately, Scott became disillusioned with the unhelpful support requests he was wading through each week and stopped supporting his plugins. After much soul searching I agreed to take on the mantle of developing the plugin.

In some ways it saddens me that I too became disillusioned with endless and repetitive support requests and also with trying to support the free version to the best of my ability when some individuals felt they were deserving of one on one technical support 24 hours a day, for free despite being rude and insulting to me.

As such the free version of Subscribe2 was sold about 2 years ago for a small sum of money to someone who thought they could monetise it. Their plan seems not to have panned out and the free version hasn’t been updated for over a year now.

That’s allowed me to focus on supporting and developing the paid version though which I hope is good news for those people willing to support Subscribe2 HTML with their money. Thank you to you all! 🙂

If you can’t get it working then:

  • Read the documentation on here and with the plugin
  • Check the WordPress Support forum
  • Read the Trouble Shooting Page
  • Finally, post a comment under the Subscribe2 version number on this site with as many details as you can provide

If you can do all of the above I will hopefully remain sane and may be able to help you.

Thanks

76 thoughts on “About”

  1. Hi. Thanks for the excellent plugin, which I’ve ALMOST got working in WordPress. Mostly it’s fine, brilliant in fact, but I think there’s a glitch in the subscribe/unsubscribe facility. On my site, under IE6, when a user responds to the confirmation email I get a page showing not only the “thank you!” message but also the text content of all my other pages too. Any idea what’s causing this? Please feel free to check it on my site http://www.entangled.org

    Also, I was wondering whether there’s a way to restrict email circulation to, say, once a week? So rather than getting a new email for each post, users would receive a compilation of the week’s posts. Is there a way to do this? My programming “skills” barely merit the name, so any help would be much appreciated!

    Many thanks,
    Nick

  2. Nick,

    What you are describing normally happens if you haven’t changed the S2PAGE variable in the code.

    WordPress gives each page and post a unique ID number – you need to tell Subscribe2 which page you have defined as your subscription page.

  3. Many thanks — it’s working fine now. Much appreciated. As for the other question — is it possible to create a weekly, rather than daily, digest?

  4. Nick,

    Glad that’s fixed it for you.

    Weekly Digests are not possible because the plugin uses WP-Cron to send the posts and there is no weekly task in WP-Cron but..

    Cron is being built into the WordPress Core code so it may be possible when 2.1 is released.

  5. Hello,

    Wonderful plugin–thanks so much for your dedicated work!

    Just one question: it doesn’t seem to email subscribers when you date a post for the future. Is this a bug? A feature for an upcoming version? Impossible? (Please email me and let me know. I use the future-posting thing a lot.)

  7. Thanks for contributing your time and labor to keep WordPress growing and evolving through plugins. I have a humble suggestion. I’m trying to look at all availlable plugins to see which to install in a new blog, and I can’t tell what this plugin does. Obviously I get that you can subscribe and get emails, but of what is unclear. I’ve seen plugins for comments, posts, etc., but I can’t find anything here that explains what Subscribe2 does. I’ve probably missed it and, if so, I’m sorry.

    If not, you might add a short paragraph to the About page that talks a little about the functionality of the plugin, pehaps before the history section. Similarly, you might create a true FAQ, since, for the new user, it’s a bit confusing scrolling through the FAQ categories.

    Anyway, I hope these are encouraging comments, rather than complaints. I’ll keep looking and maybe look on skippy’s site, via the history paragraphs in the About page, to see if it’s explained there. Thanks!

  8. I think I found an explanation under via the Plugin menu. Thanks. Since this entire site is about Subscribe2, I assumed Plugin and Widget were ways to access info about the two ipmoementations. Maybe add, or move, the Plugin lead to the About page? Anyway, thanks for all the hard work. It’s generous and appreciated.

  9. Rich,

    Thanks for the feedback – I’ll make an amendment to the “About” post.

    As for the FAQs – there’s not much I can do about the layout as this site is hosted on WordPress.com and the structure is therefore pre-defined (but on the updise it’s free!)

  10. Sure thing! I didn’t want to suggest a bunch of new work for you. I just meant you could create a standard FAQ as a page. It’s a lot easier just to add the FAQ category, of course. Thanks again. I’m trying Subscribe2 this weekend.

  13. Hi,

    I have a question for you…I hope you can help me understand this plugin a little better. When I go into Manage, then over to Subscribers, then filter to show the Public Subscribers, it shows me 3 email addresses. Two are in the middle (meaning they are confirmed) and one on the right (unconfirmed). Can you tell me, how does that unconfirmed email address get there? Did that person fill out their email address on my blog but they haven’t confirmed their subscription to the blog?

    Do you know what I am trying to ask?

    Basically…does this mean that they haven’t clicked on the link in the email they should have received to confirm their subscription, or maybe that they didn’t receive the email asking them to confirm at all?

    Does this sound correct?

  14. Tracee,

    You are quite right in your assumptions, a public user who remains on the right is one who has not clicked to confirm their subcription. You can choose to delete them or subscribe them anyway or send a reminder if you filter on Unconfirmed Subscribers.

  15. Also, if a person submits their email address to subscribe to the blog, it doesn’t email them when a new post has been made. Even if they are confirmed. It only emails the person if they are a registered user of the blog. Why would that happen?

    Does that have something to do with what Beth was talking about?

    Please help!!!

  17. Tracee,

    It could be the same problem Beth experienced, try her workaround and see if it helps. Also, contact your host and ask them why the emails are not being sent.

  18. Sorry, one more question, is there a way for people to receive an email when a comment is made? Or is this just for new posts? It would be nice if it would send an email to them if they are subscribed even if it is a new comment rather than just when it’s a post.

    I do have the subscribe to comments plugin added to the site too, but that’s not quite the same as what I am wondering.

  19. Also, what type of page does that code possibily need to be edited on, the code that you posted about with Beth’s comments.

    Sorry for all the questions, but I’d really like to get this to work for us!

  20. Tracee,

    Users can get emails for comments with the Subscribe-To-Comments. As it is written by someone else and I don’t use it on my site I have no idea how it works.

    The edits need to be made in the subscribe2.php file that you uploaded to your server, not in a WordPress page. Do this locally and upload via FTP (or use the Plugin Editor in WordPress).

  21. Hi!
    I currently have close to 500 subscribers which is the maximum number of emails per hour that my server allows. I searched for a setting in my Subscribe2 options that will tell it to send emails in increments of 500 per hour but couldn’t find anything. Any ideas how I can do this?

    Also, is there a “maximum” number of subscribers that Subscribe2 can handle? ie, can it manage thousands of subscribers?

    thanks!
    Saint Agnes

  22. Saint Agnes,

    You are basically asking about throttling for sending of emails – this is not something currently on offer in the code.

    I tried using PEAR to accomplish the same and managed it before eventually moving to VPS and avoiding the limitations of hosted server options.

    In theory there is no maximum in Subscribe2 – the limits are imposed by hosts and server hardware.

  23. hi I like your Recent Comments plugin 🙂 How did you add avatars to it? was look all over the net but didn’t find 😦 You are my last chance.

  25. Regarding Subscribe2–any chance at all you can modify it to handle multiple mailing lists (and display multiple forms)? The only plugins I’ve found that can do this are commercial; I thought I might modify yours, but maybe you have something in the works already 🙂 So, can you add this functionality? Pretty please? I’ll even help out, if you want …

  26. Ashiq,

    Subscribe2 already handles plain text and HTML email for registered users and in this way does cater to differing mailing lists.

    It does what I need it to and I would not be interested in developing it massivley in the way I think you are suggesting – but the code is free so feel at liberty to make any changes yourself to get what you are after.

  27. Hi,

    I just wanted to thank you for the great WordPress plugin. This is what I really wanted to have for my blog. It’s said that Blogs are “pull” and Emails are “push”, so with subscribe2, we can have both PUSH and PULL.

    This has big potential for our internet marketing, I think.

    Again, I appreciate your effort for that,

  28. Pingback: BarelyBlogging » Blog Archive » links for 2007-12-07

  29. I hope your plugin can help me but I’m not sure.
    I’ve a blog with a lot of users. They can introduce a post but only the best posts are published.
    I’d like a plugin that will send an email of notify only to the user that his post was published.
    Can your plugin help me?

    Thanks

  32. Fabrizio,

    Once the plugin is installed you can go to Manage->Subscribers and subscribe all Registered Users of your blog to get emails notification based on categories, so any new post in that category will go to ALL users not just the author.

  33. this may be a completely silly question, but i couldn’t find anyone talking about it on the other pages. is this plugin supposed to automatically email my subscribers when i publish? mine doesn’t do that. any advise?

  34. i tried the ‘mail test’ plugin and i got a bunch of emails, so that portion is working. i’m not sure what to do or where to look to get it working properly.

  35. Stephanie,

    If the test plugin works but Subscribe2 doesn’t then it’s down to restrictions in place on your server related to the sending of emails. Check with your host what restrictions are in place and find a work around for your needs.

  36. I have implemented the site and it is working very well so far. I have noticed that the navigation bar on the “confirmation” page is acting strangely. Is this becuase I have not set the S2PAGE variable in subscribe2.php properly? If so, how do you actually set it? I am assuming it is something that I do to this line here:

    define(‘S2PAGE’, ‘0’);

    I am new to this so thanks for your patience and excellent plugin.

  37. Gary,

    In the installation instructions you are asked to create a WordPress page. This page will have an ID listed in Manage->Pages. Take this ID number and replace the zero on the line you’ve found with this number.

  38. Hi,

    I successfully installed the the latest version of Subscribe2… thank you for making such an easy-to-use tool. I noticed, however, that there’s no real info on this website or in the docs about security, specifically whether Subscribe2 includes code to prevent SQL injection attacks.

    Could you please briefly outline Subscribe2’s security features?

    Thanks in advance for any information,
    Andrea

  39. Andrea,

    All of the admin pages created by the plugin fully utilise the built in WordPress wp_nonce functions and the form for submission of email addresses validates input to ensure the entry is an email address using the is_email function.

    That said I’d be happy to listen to any security advice from anyone who thinks the plugin could be made safer 😀

  41. Hello,
    I suggest to have a notification for new “private” post ou page for the “Registered Subscribers” only.
    Thanks to you to add this simple feature !

  42. Guilaume,

    Good point, if a post is marked as private then notifications should not go out to public subscribers, only registered subscriber to the categories. That’s easy enough to implement for the ‘per post’ notifications. I’ll get that into the next version.

  44. Guillaume,

    I think the code I’ve changed will work for both. I’ll check the changes into the SVN server tonight – would you be willing to test a new version?

  46. I’m using Subscribe2 under WordPress 2.5 and all of a sudden it has started sending two duplicate messages at a time to each subscriber per post. Has anyone else reported this? I don’t want to get blacked listed for spam!

    -Wayne

  50. The problem has actually slowed down. Now it happens every 4 or 5 messages but I don’t dare turn on my rss feeds because the last time I did this I got 36 articles in and my system sent out 72 messages to all my subscribers..
    -Wayne

  51. Wayne,

    Your RSS should have nothing to do with Subscribe2 unless your site publishes content direction from the RSS feeds of other sites. Have you set Subscribe2 to use Digest Emails or Per-Post emails? Look in Options->Subscribe2.

  52. My settings are set to per post and yes my rss feeds publish directly to my blog. I’ve change the configuration to publish to draft and then post them one at a time manually until I can get a handle on the double mailings. But like I said it is now only once in a while
    -Wayne

  54. Hi, Thank you so much for this plugin. I’ve used it for a while and it’s a lifesaver.

    I have a private WP blog and use Angsuman’s Authenticated WordPress Plugin to limit access. I recently upgraded to WP 2.5, then 2.5.1. Prior to upgrading, my site’s members were receiving emails based on post category more or less consistently (any issues I put down to spam rules, though I was never able to confirm).

    Now that I’m on the latest WP, I am the only one receiving any notifications at all. (This happened on both 2.5 and 2.5.1). I have Subscribe2 2.6 installed, and have activated it and the debug plugin. I don’t see anything on the debug page which looks like it could help. Do you have any ideas?

    Thank you!!
    Michelle

  56. I’ve just started to use Subscribe2 and have set it up to send out an email once a week.

    I was curious to notice that the first mail it has sent out notified subscribers of only one post – I had imagined it would include all of my posts from the previous week, which would have been about right, I think, for a weblog delivering nice to know rather than need to know information!

    I’ve looked around and have been unable to find a relevant dashboard control – so is the choice to alert subscribers to each and every post or just one each week please?

    Thanks,

    Gavin

  57. Gavin,

    The plugin should send a notice of all posts made since the last notification or when the plugin was installed. If you only installed and then made one post that may explain what you’ve seen. See what happens next week and it should work as you expect.

  59. Thanks for a great plugin, how do I add the unsubscribe option in the mails that are sent out?

    I appreciate your help,
    Regards,
    Manoj

  61. Hello,

    I don’t know if this request as already been done so…I would like to know if it could be possible to made several “group” of users” thant it could be possible to seperate ssome userss from others regarding sending mail. for example, we have a mailing with our contacts of other site contact for sending info about a test release and we have our visitors.

    With the option of generating severaal group, we could for example ad the first one to a group Called “Test Release” which ONLY receive a mail when test are published and a group “Visitors” for a daily mailing.

    Of course it could be expand this idea with for example, “group” for only a specific category news, one ofr another …

  62. Planet Wifi,

    You can already set categories in your blog to send or not send emails. Registered Users can choose which categories the get notifications about so your suggestion would only really apply to Public users. I think it would be a whole lot of complicated code that would not get used very often – I’ll add it to the list but it will be towards the bottom.

  63. Hi Admin,

    THX for the fast answer (Really), efffectivly your remark is correct regarding the fact we can Select or not select categories and Registerd users can do it themself. In this case it could be done by ourself like a “Mailing Manager”.

    Thx to added to the list as like as to be at the bottom of that list 😉

  64. I am a non-technie with Subscribe2 problems.
    1. At least half the time when I sign someone up for the blog they never get the confirmation email. I have tested this over the phone and the email never arrives and is not in their spam/junk file. What could be causing this?
    2. On the Manage Subscribers page, when I filter to see the unconfirmed, I click on the red X to delete them and nothing happens; if I click on the green arrow to move them to the confirmed column, nothing happens; when I click on the send reminder email, nothing happens. What am I doing wrong?

    HELP!
    Petti

  65. Petti,

    1/ If the emails send some of the time but not others it is likely to be something server side causing the problem. It is most likely to be email blocking limitations on your hosting server if the mail fails to arrive at all. Check with your hosting provider.

    2/ I guess you are using an older version of the plugin and IE is your browser. If you update to the current version of the plugin this issue is fixed.

  66. Hi!

    I really like your plugin… but it only seems to contain the content of the post when i choose “Per Post Email”. I would like it to be Daily… when i choose this, the e-mail is sent to my subscribers, but is does not contain the title and permalink of the post. Do i need the WP-cron plugin for this?

    Thnx!

  67. Jorry,

    The keywords in your email Template vary between per-post notification and digest-notifications. Try using POST, POSTTIME and TABLE.

    TITLE and PERMALINK are not used in digest mails.

  68. Hi Admin,

    Thnx for your quick reply! so if i get it right, i use “post” in stead of “titel”… i assume that posttime shows the date of the post moment, but what does table show? and which of these variables gives the link to the post?

    thnx

  70. Jorry,

    POST shows the post title, permalink and excerpt.

    POSTTIME shows the post title, date, permalink and excerpt.

    TABLE shows a list of post titles.

    And you are correct that if there have been no posts that a digest email is not sent.

  71. This plugin has many great features, but the subscription option on the registration screen is poorly designed and off-putting. When new subscribers see this screen, they don’t really know what they are being asked to commit to. Here are two suggestions: 1) All the administrator to customer the text that appears on this screen, and 2) Provide the subscription options (daily, weekly, etc. email alerts) found on the user settings subscriptioin page.

    One other concern: it’s not clear whether the weekly digest is actually implemented. It’s an option on the administrator settings for Subscribe2, but it is not an option on the user Your Subscription options page.

    –Jim Snider

  72. Apologies for the missing text in the post above. Option #1 should have read: 1) Allow the administrator to customize the text that appears on this screen.

    –Jim Snider

  73. Jim,

    The idea behind the implementation of this plugin is that the administrator adds the Subscribe2 token (and therefore the form) to a WordPress page on which you would explain to your users about the registration process and email notifications.

    Admin also decides to offer per-post OR digest notifications. Depending on the admin settings the User->Subscriptions output changes (for digest it is a yes/no opt in or out).

    It is also intended that Public subscribers are offered a lesser service level to encourage people to register with the site.

    At the end of the day I write the plugin for my needs on my sites. I then make it available for free (although donations are accepted) if other find it useful. The source code is open so you can change as much as you like to suit your own needs.

  74. I give in. I tried looking everywhere so I didn’t bother you but can’t find the question and/or answer anywhere.

    While I have only just relaunched a new website and I am trying to utilize this great ap I noticed in a test that the thank you for subscribing and manage your profile page don’t have any links back to my site. While the logo is hyperlinked it is not obvious so I want to add some sort of navigation if only hyperlinked text to those pages after sign in. I can’t find the pages, the js files or anything to point me in the right direction. What am I missing and how do I add or change the text on those pages to make them more personal and linkable back to my site.

    Thank you
    Tony

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