We host our plugin on GitHub, and develop beta features on a dev branch and hot fixes on a master branch.

On launch day, we have to complete some steps to be sure that the final version will work fine. We start by cloning the master branch in a new folder and compressing CSS files. Then we minify JS files to improve performance.

At this point, we have to pull all the latest .po files from Transifex (the localization platform) and convert them to .mo files.

After zipping the plugin, we distribute it to our beta team, to enter the last testing phase. That’s the .zip that everyone will download publicly from the WordPress plugins repository after we upload it through SVN.

During the last months, we automated all these little steps, and ultimately packed everything in a self-hosted app that you can run on your server: enter Packzip!

Packzip is able to:

• Pull from a remote git repository.
• Minify JS files.
• Compress CSS files.
• Pull latest .po files from Transifex.
• Convert .po files to .mo files.
• Output a .zip file.

The only requirement is that your project is structured like our Barebone repository.

Packzip is a ruby app, based on the awesome Sinatra framework, and integrates git and the Transifex command-line client in one tool. It also has an API to retrieve the package version and the .zip remotely; be sure to check the readme for more technical infos.

Animated GIF to show it in action? Here you go!

Packzip in action.

We hope Packzip will be an useful tool for all plugins developers, and in general for any developer tired of doing these kind of tasks manually.

Let us know on GitHub, fork it, and don’t hesitate to ask for help!

Go to Packzip on GitHub.

When Lynn set out to start a local cake club, little did she know her initiative would end up as a social network, spawning the globe two years later.

“I have to pinch myself on what I’ve created“, she tells me over the phone.

Her project starts in Leeds, UK, where a group of strangers met to share each others home baked cakes in late 2010.

The meetup’s concept is straight forward. No cupcakes, brownies or cookies allowed. You only talk cake. You don’t judge each others cakes. The venue is kept secret until the day of the event. Oh, and you eat a lot of cake.

“I created a website to invite strangers, purely to make it known with the help of social media, mostly Twitter”, says the 62 year old retiree. From the start, her goal was to gather everybody on a single platform.

The Clandestine Cake Club was thus born. The club’s expansion resembles expanding dough with an excess of yeast:

• over 9000 members
• which are in 185 local cake clubs
• in 15 nations, as distant as the Bahamas
• and a cookbook with rave reviews

Why Wysija?

“When I reached 2000 subscribers, I started using Wysija instead of MailChimp”, Lynn says.

A member of her club, Becs Rivett, turns out to be an email marketing consultant who recommended our plugin. Coincidentally, we’ve hired the talented Becs ourselves for consultancy work.

For deliverability purposes, but also for the shear amount of emails sent from the server, Becs helped her configure Wysija to send with Elastic Email, an SMTP provider.

So why would Lynn decide to switch from MailChimp to Wysija?

“I love it because my members get added automatically to my mailing list. I’ve saved a lot of time. I find the visual editor quite easy. All I want to do is add some text and some pics and send it off as quickly as possible. My difficulty is to find what’s interesting to write.”

Read between the lines: this user simply wants to send newsletters from her WordPress website, no fuss.

MailChimp is expensive

Cost comes into play, although Lynn didn’t explicitly mention it. Wysija is the cheaper alternative, in nearly all case scenarios, including Lynn’s.

Both Wysija and MailChimp have free versions of up to 2000 subscribers, which is not Lynn’s case.

MailChimp’s best offer are monthly plans. With 9000 subscribers, she would pay $75 a month, or $900 a year.

Lynn sends with Wysija and Elastic Email, which sells email credits. She sends two newsletters per month to 9,000 subscribers, which is about 240,000 emails per year, or less than $150.

Let’s sum with this simple cost comparison table: 

With the quick expansion of her members to over 10,000, MailChimp would soon double her expenses for emailing. Ouch.

Design can be improved

Lynn’s newsletter reads like a personal email, with just the right amount of images and call to actions. The layout could use a designer’s help, sure.

Like most of our users, there’s no budget for a designer, or time is better spent on content. In Lynn’s own words:

If anything else, I’d like to write more newsletters. There’s a benefit for the site. I noticed an increase in traffic. It’s one way to help promote the events.

Think, write, send… here’s a screenshot of her latest newsletter:

Good open rate

First time newsletter senders are often disappointed at their statistics, including Lynn.

Take a look at her latest newsletter’s stats:

Her stats are pretty good. She nearly has a third of opened or clicked emails. She’ll want to increase those, by playing with her subject lines and moving her call to action higher in her newsletters.

The BuddyPress setup

For Lynn Hill’s lack of technical proficiency, her curiosity and determination have transformed her to a top online community manager. Youngsters take note, she could well be your teacher in your next digital marketing class.

The Clandestine Cake Club now lives on a WordPress website turned into a social network, thanks to a plugin called BuddyPress.

Trial and errors, or simply learning by doing, has been the guiding principle of her endeavour. “Our site crashed four times in one year. I realized how important it was to have a proper hosting solution“, she recalls, still reeling from her experience.

Consolidating all the tools under the BuddyPress hood is part of her effort to seamlessly manage her community. Not just with Wysija. For example, she monitors her stats thanks to JetPack’s Stats instead of Google Analytics.

Membership websites, watch out

When I was discussing with Lynn, I noticed her automated bounce handling feature wasn’t configured. I took 15 minutes to set it up for her.

This is an essential tool to let Wysija to remove emails that have become invalid from your lists. When you get near 1000 subscribers, you might not want to manually do this task.

Moreover, a BuddyPress installation sends plenty of notification emails. This is a separate issue where Wysija has no role.

Lynn is acutely aware of this. Her hosting company provides the necessary setup for her site to send all these automated emails.

A WordPress developer called Yoast has a good article on how he handles his own transactional emails.

Final word of wisdom

Newsletters can easily drive more traffic to your site than Facebook or Twitter. Ever more so with community sites.

But watch out, BuddyPress already sends plenty of notifications emails. Don’t flood your members’ inbox. You’ll want to stick to Lynn’s schedule: two newsletters per month.

When curating over a large group of members separated by geography, or interest, it’s always good to write about your own members ideas or initiative. I love Etsy’s newsletter for just that.

Then again, you could join your local Clandestine Cake Club’s, or start a new one, and you’ll get a good idea of a proper newsletter execution as a bonus.

Below is a piechart of our users’ language distribution:

The French tendency is due to our roots. Showing up at WordPress events in France has popularized us in the country.

Our sales’ pie chart per country shows a more internationalized picture:

This is quite a different picture of the distribution of the nearly 30 million WordPress websites (excludes wordpress.com) :

Why so many English sites? The rest of the world has to catch up with the historical adoption in the US. At least, that’s my guess.

I uploaded the data obtained from the WordPress.org in this sheet.

Our translation workflow

This is how we handle translators:

1. Recruit translators in our documentation in exchange for a Premium license
2. Get them to signup to our translation page on Transifex
3. They translate or update their language
4. Translators get an email notification when a new version is out

Updates have more or less 50 new strings. Within 1 week of a release, a dozen languages are fully translated. The responsiveness of our translators is quite rewarding.

Treat translators well

It’s quite amazing how many users will volunteer to translate your theme or plugin. In our case, we get new propositions every week.

We also get power translators, such as the remarkable Djio in Brazil, who extend their help beyond translation. Hats off.

However, it’s frustrating to see Premium and Freemium authors taking translators’ time for granted. I’ve seen volunteers expect little in return for their work. As a translator myself, I’ve witnessed a lack of recognition in the past.

If you’re serious about your theme or plugin, treating your translators as priority is an easy way to increase your user base.

Here’s how we prioritize our translators:

1. Respond quickly to them
2. Offer fast fixes for their issues
3. Give them a free license or something else, even for an update
4. Keep them in the loop for upcoming updates

Get a pro translator onboard

You might want to hire a professional software translator, especially if you’re a Premium or Freemium solution, like us. We took on François-Xavier (photo), a translation expert for hire with a rare pedigree.

He also works or volunteers for known projects and authors. To name a few: Yoast, Pippins, DevPress, Wp to Twitter, Hybrid themes & NextGen.

He essentially works 2 days a month and does the following:

1. audits our plugin’s translation
2. wrote an internal guideline for our developers
3. helps managing our translators
4. makes changes to our code directly in GitHub
5. translates to French

The traditional translation tools are poor

The two common tools to manage translators and their translations in WordPress are frustrating.

First comes Poedit. Translators send translation files by email called MO and PO to plugin or theme authors. Quite simple. New translators will need to read a guide to use Poedit, unfortunately. This method is untenable when an author has to manage several translators working on several languages.

Alternatively, you can use GlotPress, an online translation application with lots of potential. Yoast installed it for his plugins, as do the Automattic folks for 6 of their plugins.

GlotPress would be a game changer if it was integrated directly in the theme and plugin repository. Unfortunately, this is not happening any time soon, says Otto, an administrator of the theme and plugin repository, when I contacted him by email.

Moreover, the development of GlotPress has been stalled for a while. The current plan is to convert it to a plugin. This upgrade is still in its infancy and is not a priority, according to Marko, one of its lead developers.

Transifex, the new way to translate

Transifex is a coherent online translation tool used by Reddit, Pinterest, Eventbrite, and Firefox, just to name a few of their 6000 projects with over 60,000 users. Impressive for a startup without seed funding.

This is what their slick user interface for online translation looks like:

Based on our own experience in the past 9 months, I believe Transifex can become the essential translation tool for our WordPress community. Or even a hub.

Joomla translators setup a successful concerted effort to translate over 200 components, or plugins, in one big joint effort using Transifex. You can view the project’s page on Transifex to get an idea of the scale.

Here’s a few reasons why Transifex meets our community’s needs:

• It makes both translating and managing translators simple.
• It’s a hosted solution.
• They release improvements every month.
• They respond to our feedback.
• It’s free for open source projects.
• You can even hire a translator.

“Try out Transifex and let us know how we can become a great tool for WP developers“, says Dimitri, Transifex’s CEO, when contacted by email.

Who wouldn’t be eager to leverage the largest Open Source community?

I set out to write a full comparison of autoresponder plugins. I searched, I tried, and I got discouraged.

Instead, this post will cover our own solution with splashy video. No more, no less. If you have less than 2000 subscribers, it won’t cost you a dime to set up. Ready?

What is an autoresponder?

It’s an email that is sent automatically to someone after he does something. In Wysija, there are 2 such events:

1. When someone subscribes to a mailing list.
2. When someone subscribes to your site as a WordPress user.

For example, you can send 3 emails with instructions for your online course. Each are sent a week apart, after someone subscribes. This often called a “drip campaign” in marketing terminology.

Why are autoresponders useful?

Because people check their emails more than they visit your site. It’s a good to trick to draw the crowds back to your site.

In any case, you can’t possibly send all these single emails yourself. Automate instead.

When are autoresponders annoying?

1. When you send too many of them in short period of time.
2. When your content isn’t interesting, or old.
3. When the emails are not personalized.

Can the activation email be an autoresponder?

Yes, you can use it as an autoresponder, like offering a download link.

Indeed, Wysija sends an activation email after someone subscribes so he can confirm his email address. But beware of this technique because:

1. If you have an important link, your subscriber might forget to confirm his subscription in the first place
2. Wysija’s activation email can’t be redesigned and offers no stats.

Where is the autoresponder in Wysija?

Yes, we agree, it’s a little obscure. Bad user interface on our end. See the video above or this screenshot of Step 1 of a new email:

Is a free plugin really right for this?

It sure is. If it’s not free, it’s at least a lot cheaper.

There are a few things you need to consider:

1. Some of the extra features found in Aweber, Constant Contact and MailChimp are not yet available in Wysija.
2. Wysija doesn’t send emails itself. Make sure you pick the right sending method to avoid falling in the spam box. It costs a bit, but it’s worth it.

Will Wysija improve its simple autoresponder?

Yes, we will.

For example, some users want to send in some time windows. Others want to group the autoresponders in a series.

Give us your feedback in the comments below and we’ll be happy to read them.

How do we assess that we’re doing so well? We’re in the top 30 highest rated and most popular plugins on the wordpress.org repository.

Every day there are over 1000 downloads of Wysija. More and more people are recommending us to their friends and colleagues.

3 items we’re working on, which are not features

With growth comes challenges, which can be split in 3:

1. scaling the team
2. improving our code
3. handling more support

Our team has recently increased to 7 people, most of which are full time. Our 3 new comers have had to learn a lot of ropes. Kudos to Ami, Tung and Marco for adopting and applying our philosophy: emailing is a pain. We’re pain killers.

Improving our code is at the top of our agenda. With the arrival of Marco, a healthy discussion was started on standards, guidelines, and ways to improve collaboration. We agree that we can raise the bar, and we will.

Our support is holding up. We’re handling the 10% increase of questions every month. We answer everybody within 14 hours on average. We’re available 7 days a week, and sometimes we cover 24h days. February saw over 1700 support queries, which have an average of 2.5 replies each. I’m sure we can do better still, and we’re always looking at ways to improve.

We’re still hungry

In fact, we’re starving. I’m talking about features.

You might notice that we’re not as fast in releasing big features as we’ve been in the past. Rest assured, we’re right now in the middle of optimizing our team to get us up to speed again.

It’s part of growing up. Think of a teenager with aching bones. That’s us, right in the midst of pimply puberty.

What about us, the humans?

Yes, we are flesh and bones. And with feelings too!

Some of our biggest supporters have gotten to know us a bit and have grown on us. Martin, Patty, Larry, FxB, Holger, and so many others. The following is for them, and any who might be interested as well.

1. Jonathan (dev of visual editor, shop, account) moved to China recently. His girl is expecting a kid. The first Wysija baby.
2. Ben (devs the plugin part) now lives in Hanoi. His girl got a job there and he followed. He recruited Tung, which you might meet if you request help.
3. Adrien is still busy on our spam score tool and his own Joomla plugin for newsletters.
4. Ami from Poland (support) got to meet Adrien and myself for the first time in Paris, during the WordCamp.
5. Marco (Italian dev in Spain or NYC), well, I’m not too sure, because he’s always happy and although we talk a lot, it’s always about work.
6. As for myself, I’ve been a little stressed with work recently. Thankfully, I have coworkers that keep me grounded. Thanks guys!

And that’s it for our latest update.

You can view all of them at the top of our themes’ page and in your plugin.

Moreover, 10 current Premium themes become free. That’s over 30 free email templates. I nod for that.

Our users have installed, tried and tested themes over 25 000 times in our first year. We’ll work on bringing you more themes and adding more styles to increase design flexibility with our visual editor. That’s one of the many things planned in 2013.

Olivier (pictured) and Alexandre, the guys who run Studio Corpus, aren’t particularly web oriented. Refreshing. Check out their portfolio to discover their original projects on different mediums.

How did they get in touch with us? Olivier fell in love with my great roommate, Martine, a year ago. She moved in with him last summer. Although I lost a fun and creative housemate, I got a bit of Olivier’s talent in exchange. Funny how life works, ain’t it?

I read text, not images

It all begins with the subject. What will make me click on your email in my inbox full of unreads? Sender and subject, that’s it. Keep your subjects short, precise, relevant to your geography, event, etc. Remy of emailblog.eu has his own top 10 subjects for 2012.

Second, I see a lot of long, long emails. Gmail has even begun to chop off the bottom of emails with too much content. Inboxes are now more than ever on mobile phones. So how long is long? That depends on how often you send and what type of content or site you have.

Generally, if you think your length is good, that means you can bring out the ax and scream: “Here’s Johnny!“

Do you know you can personalize your email with first and last name? See screenshot above on how you do add it in Wysija. Recipients know it’s programmed by a computer, sure. But when I see my first name with a text written in the first person, I feel acknowledged.

Manage expectations

Irregular sending. I’ve worked in media for several years. Anticipation is one of the most important engagement factors of audience building. TV news report is on the hour. Traffic reports are always at the same time on the radio. Websites create expectation by publishing content on specific days and times. Pick your own frequency and stick with it.

You flooded my inbox with too many emails. It’s all about expectation, again. For example, we ourselves only send newsletters every other month. On your subscription form, state clearly how often you send emails (see in the footer below, our own form). Alternatively, create two lists to cater for weeklies, and the monthlies, and let new subscribers decide for themselves.

Write your newsletter for readability

Many of the rules of writing for the web apply to newsletters, which I can only stress:

1. Clear and short titles
2. Obvious call to action (if any)
3. One idea per paragraph
4. 2 or 3 sentences per paragraph
5. use bullet points for enumerations
6. black typography on white or pale background (most of you do this)

High up in the #fail department, you’ll find header image that take too much vertical space. This creates a huge white gap when images are disabled by default. On my laptop or phone, those emails appear totally blank at first.

Speaking of disabled images, many users forget to add an alternate text which shows when images are disabled. In Wysija, simply select an image, click on the link button to add this text.

Summary: WordPress users aren’t designers

“Photoshop should be mandatory in highschool“, once said Paula, a brilliant graphic designer I had the pleasure to work with in the Silicon Valley.

Our users don’t know Photoshop. We don’t expect them too. Or do they even visit the Styles tab in our visual editor. We expected them too!

Our themes were downloaded 20 000 times in December 2012. Almost equivalent to the 250 000 downloads of Wysija itself. Yet, only 5000 Photoshop files were downloaded.

For the fodder, more than once, users tried to upload PSD files directly to Wysija. They don’t know what slicing images are, let alone “CSS“.

Sadly, it requires knowledge of an image editor to truly create a beautiful newsletter since email clients are unfortunately not typography friendly.

Even then, users rarely use more than one type headlines (Title 1, 2 or 3), ignore background colors or don’t know they can scale their images.

This alone makes me wonder how many design options we should add to the editor in the future. Less bloat, the better.

I’ll leave you with one of my favorite newsletter of 2012, from New York. It’s always short, pretty, clean, to the point and with titles that tempt me. It’s a weekly that’s always on time. Click on it to see the web version.

Quite a few things, all shaped by 30 releases, 25 000 active users (guesstimate), 200 000 downloads and plenty of visits to WordCamps.

At the end of this post, I’ll also cover what to expect in the next 12 months.

Two different user expectations

Free and paying users have been waiting for a quality plugin for newsletters for a while. Both have different expectations.

WordPress users have come to expect lower quality from free plugins: complex user interfaces, little or no support, or relinquished code. It’s not a criticism. It’s rather the nature of a directory of free software, without understating the recent explosion of the Premium.

At the other end of the spectrum, are the customers of online email marketing services. We’re talking about Aweber, MailChimp, Campaign Monitor, MadMimi and Constant Contact. The competition between these players has raised the bar in terms of quality.

Their customers discover an alternative called Wysija, both simple and cheap. They expect the same firepower.

Operating within WordPress gives us a huge advantage. But it’s also our Achilles’ heel. WordPress plugins are affected by plugin conflicts (hello ThemeForest!), WordPress versions, and weird server configurations, not to mention that nearly all popular hosts are blacklisted for sending. It’s not always smooth sailing for our users.

Freemium works on WordPress

This is no secret. What’s there to learn, then? It took us 15 months to become “profitable”, and yet, we guesstimate that 99% of our users are running the free version.

There are 3 good reasons to go Freemium:

1. Competitors have free plans, like MailChimp
2. Give back to the community
3. More users, more feedback

Our Premium customer base needs to grow if we want to slug in the big leagues. Our plan was to first build a solid free plugin, then work on features and services for the Premium. This is the phase we are entering now. Let’s play hardball. You pitch, I’ll swing.

We polled our customers recently on why they purchased the Premium. They felt more compelled to pay to encourage us than to get priority support. Maybe our free support is already too good?

The main reason to buy was our limit of 2000 subscribers. This nearly got us kicked out of the repository and killed our business model. Understandably, we walk on a fine line according to the guidelines. We strongly believe that the plugin and theme repositories should remain totally free. Is it ironic? Not really.

Coupons and affiliation

We’ve shied away from coupons. We already give a completely functional plugin for free. Users seldom pick an emailing solution based on a discount, but rather on user experience and features.

We’ve relied on our users to promote our plugin, and shunned affiliation. It seems to work. How? We point our satisfied users to this page which gives tips on how to promote us.

Word of mouth is slower than blatant affiliation. When it does finally pay off, it’s the best organic SEO.

Could we get more sales from affiliations? Probably so.

If you want to run fast, run alone…

If you want to run far, run together. This African proverb brings you to my following tale.

This past summer, I ran the San Francisco marathon. My first. Two things kept me going when my legs ditched: my jogging partner, a cerebral mathematician at Google, and my mom’s spirit. She was a formidable athlete herself who lost a long battle to cancer 6 years ago.

Wysija is the marathon I’m running with Ben, Jo and Adrien. We’re holding together by a similar determination and faith. We’re in it together, same pace. Our users are like the crowds cheering the runners on.

Coming to this year’s end, yes, we’re tired. Our rhythm has wavered and we’re a bit out of breath. It’s challenging to prioritize tasks with 4 equal partners.

Positives are plenty. We have heated debates, but never yell. We share our mistakes. We adapt to each others’s quirks. We apologize when we screw up. We help each other out. It’s part of going further together.

It’s sincerely a pleasure to share this run with 3 other guys I barely knew before. I’m certain today that we’ll go even further together. I dare say: the best is yet to come.

Pick a better name

Wysija. How do you pronounce it? How do you spell it? What does it even mean?

For the record, it’s an acronym: what you send is just awesome. Like Wysiwyg, which we still have to spell in our heads while we type it on the keyboard, right?

Propose a cooler name and we will take it. We’ve been trying for 3 months ourselves, to no avail. My partner Ben is nearly bald from pulling out his hair.

The next 12 months

We want to grow our user base. We want to make a better product. We’re ambitious.

There are 4 challenges to tackle in 2013:

1. Ensure deliverability ourselves. Users blame us when their emails fall in the spam traps. And why wouldn’t they?
2. Shorten the configuration time.
3. Keep simplicity while adding new features
4. Scale the team. We’re hiring. Interested? Get in touch.

What we’re currently working on:

• we’re training a new support staff called Ami.
• 2 new licenses before the end of the year:
  • 4 Premiums for $299 / year
  • unlimited sites for $599 / year
• form designer with custom fields (gender, phone, etc.). This is a biggy, so it’ll be released in waves.
• better settings for WordPress multisite

This coming weekend

We’ll be relaxing. Talking it real easy. It’s been a long 53rd week!

Our users give us positive feedback on how “easy it is“. The adoption rate of our plugin tells a similar tale.

Over half of Wysija’s 175 000 downloads use the latest versions. This is the story told in this piechart on our page on the WordPress plugins’ repository:

But what about the unhappy people who dropped Wysija after 5 minutes? We’ll never hear from them. A tree fell in the forest, and we weren’t there to hear it.

The happy users themselves will forgive you for the small confusing details or non critical bugs. They’ll never mention them to you. You simply won’t know.

Don’t ask questions, let them do it

The idea to create user tests was largely inspired by the group working on WordPress’ user interface. The videos helped them make smart improvements.

We ran 5 user tests of our own recently with the help of Siobhan*, an independent consultant. It’s ridiculously easy to set up thanks to UserTesting. It has its limits, but it is fast and cheap.

2 things we need to know:

1. how do users pick a plugin on the WordPress repository?
2. what do users think in the first 5 minutes of using Wysija?

Take a look at one example:

The good, the bad, and the UI

The results reassured us, but we discovered a few surprising elements nevertheless.

What we observed as “bad”:

1. There’s no single obvious call to action on the first page they see, the newsletters list. They’re not sure what to do.
2. Nobody reads the guide in our default newsletter. Too long.
3. The plugin’s messages in beige at the top of pages are ignored. Totally.
4. The default newsletter’s browser version is blank. A new bug!
5. 2 users didn’t realize they could click on the newsletter to edit it.
6. Our name, Wysija. You can’t pronounce it. You can’t remember it. “If it sounds complicated, it’s probably complicated“, – Myself, Kim.

The positive points:

• the visual editor is appreciated by users of all ability.
• the widget is easy to configure.
• the settings aren’t as intimidating as we thought.
• these users are actually looking for a newsletter plugin for their own site.
• star rating is critical because it’s the only element of differentiation when searching for plugins on the repository.

Next steps

We’re hungry for different information now. For example, we can’t answer these simple questions:

1. on average, how many lists do our users have?
2. on average, how many subscribers do our users have?
3. how many newsletters a month do they send?

Our users will soon be able to share anonymous data with us, if they want. More data equals better plugin. Right?

* Siobhan is pronounced "Shé-von". That's more complicated than "Wysija".

1. Additional fields in their forms for phone numbers, gender, country, city, birthday, etc.
2. A way to design their subscription forms easily without code

We’re going to address both with a single new form designer. You’ll be able to drag and drop your fields into your form, but also add styling, in one interface.

Think of our beloved visual editor for your newsletter. But this time for forms.

We’re not sending Curiosity to Mars, but still, such a feature does require time and thought by the team here (essentially Ben, the  WordPress master coder, who points me in the right direction).

Our first step is to move the form’s options away from the widget and put them in our plugin’s settings page. This is what it looks like, in our wireframes at least:

One feature, trickled

We’ll roll these features out in steps in the next several weeks, like this:

1. Moving subscription from options from widget to settings page
2. Adapting our import tool to detect additional fields: date added, country, etc.
3. Adapting our synch to import additional fields from other emailing plugins, such as Tribulant, MailPress, Subscribe2, etc.
4. Integrate all custom fields: country, city, phone number, radio buttons, checkboxes, etc.
5. Polish based on feedback
6. Form styler (to be wireframed)
7. Segmentation of lists based on custom fields (to be wireframed).

Feel free to give us feedback on the PDF if you’re into user interface design. This document is our 4th version compiled over 3 months. Yup, we take our time to make things right!