Welcome to our monthly newsletter, where we publish product updates and our favourite newsletter tips. Enjoy!
Happy new year!
Hi everyone,
Things have been a little quiet on our end as we slowly roll out Newsletter Glue v3.
Here’s what you need to know:
Newsletter Glue v3 is now production ready. We’d like to invite you to test and use it.
“How can I get it?”
Please reply to this email and I will send you a dropbox link with v3.
I recommend you test it on a staging site. Although we do already have customers using it in production.
Because it’s not publicly available, any subsequent v3 updates will be sent to you via email. So please look out for them after that.
“When will this be publicly available?”
We will be releasing it as a staged roll out. In Feb or March. We’ll release it to 25% of our customers for 2 weeks, then the next 25%, and so on.
If there are any major issues, we will pause further roll out and fix them, before continuing.
So I can’t promise exactly when it’ll be available as an auto-update in your WP admin, but it should be between Feb – April.
“Why has this taken so long?”
This is a breaking change that affects 100% of our customers. So it’s important that we go slow and over-communicate.
Despite my many emails, Twitter posts and personal messages over the past year, it’s inevitable that some customers have yet to hear about v3. They might happily update their plugin, only to find things broken.
We want to be prepared to help when this inevitably happens. And the only way to be prepared and have the bandwidth to do so is by going really slowly and ensuring our small support team isn’t overloaded.
With all that in mind…
I highly recommend you test it out BEFORE HAND to avoid any surprises.
“Why do I need to test v3 before it’s live?”
There are breaking changes that affect 100% of our customers.
We will no longer be using core blocks (e.g. Headings, text, images) in our newsletter CPT. We’ve rebuilt our own headings, text, images, etc blocks from scratch.
We’ve also rebuilt all our existing blocks too.
This means you’ll have to rebuild all your templates using our new blocks.
Your old newsletters will still show up properly for your readers and visitors on your websites. But you will no longer be able to edit them as some of those blocks might be broken.
“Why would you make such a huge change?”
This was a necessary step in order to create a new generation of email builder that is what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
In the past, our email builder was always in conflict with your site theme’s styling. This created a mental hurdle for users to get used to, wasn’t the best experience, and created some CSS issues that were unfixable (because of theme conflicts).
With v3, the email builder is 99% what your readers will see in their inbox.
In addition, we’re also finally introducing mobile controls!
We waited years for WordPress core to introduce this, but were told early last year that it’s not going to happen as core is embracing intrinsic design. This might work for some websites, but email design is completely different, and intrinsic design doesn’t work for email.
This was another huge reason to build all our own blocks with mobile controls.
Final thoughts
This was a huge undertaking. This was the only big project we worked on in 2023 and we’re really proud to bring this to you.
If you’d like to get a preview of v3, you can watch this livestream where I rebuilt a New Yorker newsletter with Newsletter Glue.
That’s it for this product update. Thanks for reading.
Best,
Lesley
Built with Newsletter Glue.