Please check this FAQ to see if your questions have already been answered. If not, you can use the Contact section to send me details of the problem, and I will try to find time to help although I cannot guarantee it.
Premium plugin users have a dedicated support section that can be accessed from the Premium Support tab in the Premium plugin.
Installation (4)
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.
Customisation (1)
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{}
Compatible Web Hosts (3)
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
• First, GoDaddy’s Windows hosted WordPress does not support Cron so I needed to switch to their Linux platform if I wanted regularly scheduled e-mails, I have a low volume site and did not want to use an external service to hit my site to trigger wp-cron.
• My GoDaddy account came with one of their Workspace e-mail accounts which is, I’d guess, what most people would use as this is a normal account with POP & Webmail.
o This free / included account does not support IMAP, you’d need to upgrade to get IMAP support but this doesn’t matter as you’ll see next.
• After testing over and over with SSL, no SSL, changing the ports, verifying username & password configuration was correct, etc. I tried with my personal Comcast account and a Gmail account and nothing would work so I installed the plug-in Snitch to see if I could see outgoing POP connection attempts but I could not.
• Next, I logged in via SSH to my server to see if I could ping the mail server pop.secureserver.net and I could but Telnet was not available to test further.
• Several support calls did not help because the agents did not fully understand what I was trying to do and they kept pointing me to MX record issues.
• I finally got a rep on the phone who confirmed that GoDaddy blocks POP and IMAP at some point, probably outgoing on the server but he could not explain where or how but did seemingly confirm it was blocked and there was no setting to unblock it… I thought I was done.
• That rep suggested that I could configure local mail on my server and NOT use GoDaddy’s standard mail account. I had not initially even considered this because I only use the server for WordPress and already had an included GoDaddy e-mail account. Once I configured this and confirmed it could send / receive e-mail, it was a simple matter of changing the incoming Mail Server name to localhost or the hostname of my server.
o This got things working but only on 110, SSL / 995 does not appear to work but I’m not too concerned about it because the communication is only local and not over a public network.
I hope this helps someone else either with GoDaddy or another hosting provider, I couldn’t find an answer on Google and was becoming very frustrated. GoDaddy’s support agents are generally pretty good but on this particular issue, they were just not understanding what I was trying to accomplish.
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!
Troubleshooting (2)
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.
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.