Faq

This plugin will work best if you have the ability to run Cron Scripts on your web server.

The plugin needs to run specific functions at certain intervals to check for new messages for your mailing group(s), send messages on, check for bouncing messages to members, etc. The plugin is set to run these functions any time someone visits your website, as that helps the scripts in question be triggered into action.

However, if you have a low-traffic website, your mailing group messages will not be processed as regularly as you might like. This can be much improved if you have access to an online control panel, such as cPanel, where you can access the Cron Jobs, or Scheduled Tasks, and link to these scripts that are supplied with the plugin.

The instructions for this are included in the plugin’s Help section.

WPMG comes with a shortcode to display subscription form for mailing groups on your website. It also has a shortcode (pro-feature) for displaying all emails from any group on your website.

1- The shortcode to display the registration form on a page of your WordPress website is:

[mailing_group_form]

You can specify which type of mailing group you want to display by using visibility condition in the shortcode, like this:

[mailing_group_form visibility=’Public’]

[mailing_group_form visibility=’Private’]

[mailing_group_form visibility=’Invitation’]

The Public / Private / Invitation status of a Mailing Group is chosen within its settings when you add it from new, or edit an existing one. If you set a Mailing Group to “Public” in its settings, it will show by default when you just use the shortcode [mailing_group_form]. The “Invitation” and “Private” Mailing Groups will only be displayed if you specific that within the shortcode, as shown above, otherwise they remain hidden from public view.

2- This shortcode only works for pro version . Make sure that in mailing groups edit page, following options are set for archives.

The wpmg_email_list shortcode displays list of emails from any group on a front end page. Use it like below:

[wpmg_email_list group_email='your-group-email@yourdomain.com' emails_per_page='8']

Just replace “your-group-email@yourdomain.com” with your group email for which you want to display all emails. The emails will be displayed as below:

1 – Set up a POP / IMAP email box on your web server with the name of the mailing group you would like to use. For example, my-list@mailserver.com.
Remember the password you chose, and note down the POP and SMTP mail servers and ports you need to access it with.

2 – Install WP Mailing Group plugin via your website’s WordPress Administration area, and go to Mailing Groups > Add New Mailing Group to create your first Mailing Group. Use the settings from the POP / IMAP email box you set up in step 1. If you are not sure about “Choose Mailing Function” option, select Wp mail option.

3 – (optional step – if you do all settings correctly and still emails don’t go through) ONLY if your website does NOT have traffic (eg. a visitor every couple of minutes), go to the Cron Jobs / Scheduled Tasks area of your web server’s control panel, and paste in the following line in the Command text field:

wget http://www.yoursite.com/wp-cron.php

On some systems, you may need to use a curl function instead: curl -s http://www.yoursite.com/wp-cron.php

For either function, the suggested frequency is every 2 minutes.

Full information on this can be found in the plugin’s General Settings > Help panel.

4 – Go to the plugin’s General Settings > Introduction panel, and type in the Administrator Email Settings for your Mailing Groups. Then save all your settings there. You now have a “Test Email connection” button in group settings in plugin’s latest version, which will tell you if plugin is able to connect to your email inbox and read emails or not. It will display errors which will help you debug if plugin cannot connect. You can now use “gmail” as your email inbox, but some servers won’t allow accessing gmail from them, so you might get errors and not connect. Also go through this guide about troubleshooting emails not being sent by WPMG

5 – Insert the [mailing_group_form] shortcode on a page on your WordPress website, within page / post text or in a widget, so members can request to sign up for your Mailing Group. You can also add members manually from the plugin’s Add Subscribers or Import Users areas.

6 – You are now ready to receive membership applications for your Mailing Group, which will show in the plugin’s Subscription Requests area, or to let the users that you signed up directly know that the Mailing Group is ready to use!

NB: If you chose to be alerted when there are new Subscription Requests (via the Administrator Email Settings, on the General Settings > Introduction tab), you will receive an email each time a new member wants to join. You can then log in and approve their membership via the Subscription Requests page.

You can also add members directly to Mailing Groups via the Subscription Requests > Add New Subscriber tab, OR via Mailing Groups > Add Member

There are multiple Send Mail settings you can choose from, for each Mailing Group that you configure:

• External SMTP
• WP Mail
• PHP Mail

If none of those work for you, and the emails from your Mailing Group are not reaching the members, we have arrangements with two highly reputable external SMTP providers who can assist:

 

You will receive 2000 credits FREE with them when you register with Elastic Email using the referral link below, negotiated especially for WP Mailing Group plugin users. There is no monthly subscription requirement, and credits do not expire:
https://elasticemail.com/account#/create-account?r=85ba8e4c-85d5-4fd1-bceb-e6d501fe6c64&p=REF_STD

 

You can send up to 400 emails FREE per day, when you register with Send Grid
using the referral link below:
http://mbsy.co/sendgrid/16871625

 
Simply sign up with either of the SMTP service providers above, and when your account with them has been verified, you can copy and paste the SMTP settings from them directly into your WP Mailing Group settings in the SMTP box.

You can customise the styles used in the Registration Form’s appearance via the General Settings > Stylesheet tab.

Here is the list of default styles available for customisation:

/* top main div */
.user_form_div{}

/* form main div */
.form-wrap{}

/* messages class */
.updated, .error {
margin: 5px 0 15px;
padding-left:5px;
}

.updated {
background-color:#FFCC66;
border-color: #333333;
}

.error {
background-color:#FFCCCC;
padding-left:5px;
}

/* form fields div */
.form-field {}

/* form field inputs */
.form-field input {} /* first name input */
.fname{}

/* email input */
.email{}

/* checkbox class */
.selector{}

/* captcha field Id */
#c_captcha{}

/* submit Id */
#submit{}

/* group listing div */
.outer_group_div {}

/* group checkboxes div */
.check_div_imp{}

/* group checkbox p */
.inner_check_imp{}

/* submit p class */
.submit{}
.button{}

/* Form field labels */
#mailingrequestform label{}

/* Mailing group listing */
.inner_check_imp_group{}

This plugin is not supported on hosts where allow_url_fopen and imap_open() is disabled. NetworkSolutions is unfortunate one of those hosts. It gives us no way to collect the new incoming emails.

This issue has been noticed by users of other plugins as well:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8599463/retrieving-pop3-with-php-on-a-shared-server-that-doesnt-allow-imap-open

After some extensive testing, we know that GoDaddy is compatible with the WordPress Mailing Group plugin, as of November 2014.

You cannot use the “SMTP mail” option for sending mails, but you can use the “WP Mail” or “PHP Mail” options instead under Choose Mailing Function, when you Add / Edit a Mailing Group.

One of our users was using Godaddy Windows hosted wordpress, it does not support cron. So if you are on it, switch to Linux. Thanks to Dan Tesch who gave us an account of his problem finding and resolution on GoDaddy wordpress hosting in details. Thanks to him. Read below:


Difficulties getting WordPress Mailing Group Plugin working on GoDaddy and resolution

Please send me a message via the Contact page if you have successfully installed and can now run WordPress Mailing Group on your web host.

Then I can add it to the list of Compatible Hosts, and other users can benefit from this knowledge if they are looking for somewhere to host their WordPress website.

Thanks!

If in your group emails you receive:

-HTML code or HTML tags or “<br>” tags or “<p>” tags.

-No line breaks.

-German characters like “ü”, “ä”, “ö” and “ß”, not displaying.

-Stylesheet at top of email content.

Download Fix HTML, German language characters and lineBreaks Plugin and activate it, this will resolve these problems in most cases.

DOWNLOAD FIX HTML PLUGIN

If you are still seeing weird “A”s or boxes in your content? seeing HTML tags like
in your email content? , there are some additional ways to prevent that behavior.

• The first troubleshooting step is to make sure Email format for users is set to “HTML”. This will likely resolve your problem.
• If you’re providing your own HTML code, make sure that you’re coding special characters for
  UTF-8 or that you have your HTML editor, such as Dreamweaver, set to code for UTF-8.
• If you need more resources for that type of coding, do a Google search for “special Characters” UTF-8 or “HTML Editor” UTF-8 and
  for more resources.

• If you’re using any WYSIWYG editor, make sure that you copy in your content to a simple text editor like
  Notepad++ or
  TextWrangler, so that don’t bring in any
  junk code or special characters that aren’t compatible with our system.

If you come across this issue, it is unfortunately beyond the scope of even the Premium assistance, as it is related to your server or your email client, and not to the plugin itself.

If you wish to import users from a CSV or VCF file, you must first set up a Mailing Group to import them into, otherwise the import function will not work.

So please “Add a New Mailing Group” first, and then go to the Import Users page afterwards to import the CSV or VCF file there.