June 2013 • Post Status

Teach yourself programming in ten years

Peter Norvig is the Director of Research at Google. Years ago, he wrote this … Read more

WordCamp Europe tickets are on sale

WordCamp Europe tickets are on sale now. The tickets cost 60 Euros for the … Read more

There are no small changes

“Scope grows in minutes, not months. Look after the minutes, and the months take … Read more

The truth about building commercial WordPress plugins

It’s not easy to make good, sustainable income selling commercial WordPress plugins. Tom McFarlin … Read more

The Styles plugin integrates a ton of customizer options into the default themes

I ran across the Styles plugin today, thanks to a tweet from Brady Vercher. I was intrigued because Brady said, “I really think this plugin could be the standard for easily customizing themes.” That’s quite a statement. But after installing Styles and playing with it a little bit, I can definitely see it being a great plugin for site owners who aren’t comfortable customizing CSS in WordPress themes.

Styles is a free plugin on WordPress.org that has extension plugins for each theme that it integrates with. Currently, you can get the extensions for each of the default themes, Twenty Ten through Twenty Thirteen, for free. The plugin homepage has a cart icon and a “free” banner on each of these themes, hinting rather obviously that their intention is to offer paid extensions for customizing other popular themes.

Here’s a video overview of Styles:

Page.ly acquired BlogDroid

Page.ly, the oldest managed WordPress hosting provider, has acquired BlogDroid. BlogDroid is a newer player in … Read more

Designing in the browser

Designing in the browser has been talked about by many industry leading designers. Here … Read more

Seriously awesome tutorial on Git branching

It’s a given that you need to know SVN to work with WordPress, but … Read more

A/B Testing in WordPress

If you use WordPress for your business website or to run your business entirely, … Read more

WordPress 3.5.2 released (maintenance and security release)

WordPress 3.5.2 has just been released. As this is a maintenance and security release, … Read more

Week in WordPress podcast: How much is WordPress worth?

I was just on the Week in WordPress podcast with Jeff Chandler, of WP … Read more

How to build websites your customers will love

I’ve really been enjoying Help Scout’s blog the past few months. In a recent … Read more

Lessons for plugin developers from Joost de Valk

Joost de Valk published to his blog this morning about a mistake he made … Read more

WYSIJA is a surprisingly delightful WordPress newsletter plugin

WYSIJA. A play on WYSIWYG, WYSIJA stands for “What You Send Is Just Awesome.” Yeah, it’s tough to remember. But once you check it out, this plugin is hard to forget.

The team of seven people behind WYSIJA is from all over the world; and their plugin has steadily grown over the last year to be a dominant force in the WordPress newsletter space. This free plugin has almost half a million downloads in just over a year, and it has a staggering percentage of 5 star ratings on the WordPress repository.

I first discovered WYSIJA around August of 2012, because I had a client that was looking for a WordPress interface to create their newsletters. This is a common reason for people who try it out. I was really surprised just how easy of an experience they made creating newsletters with their drag and drop interface, especially because my only comparison was Mailchimp, who take their newsletter creation experience very seriously and have a huge team working on the design and form factors.

Similar to Mailchimp, you can send up to 2,000 newsletters per month with WYSIJA for free. For those that are pessimistic of WordPress’ ability to send mail (a worthy concern for many hosts), you can sync delivery with a Gmail Account or over SMTP. There are a ton of other features that integrate nicely with WordPress as well, such as auto-sending newsletters with new posts, batch delivery, CSV exports, email notifications to admins, and integrated signup options for various parts of your website.