Add Blog / News section to the site

[chriscroome]

This was discussed at the meeting on 16th Feb 2017 at Goldsmiths.

[chriscroome]

See also the thread on Loomio about a newsletter -- any newsletters that are produced should be posted to the site, and perhaps we should add JetPack to the site so that people can signup via wordpress.com to receive emails when new content is posted to the site? Or is there a better plugin that could be used?

[decentral1se]

This would be cool. Maybe instead of trying to create new content, we could aggregate people who are already happy creating content in the CoTech network and show that? This would probably mean just collecting some blogs of coops and/or individual members and showing it somehow. Just an idea off the top of my head.

It looks like the newsletter never took off.

[decentral1se]

Necromancy - https://community.coops.tech/t/cotech-newsletter-blog-o-sphere/462

[chriscroome]

This has been discussed on community.coops.tech and git.coop and in #newsletter on Slack.

I have installed the Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin on the dev site and updated the script to update the dev site with the live database to ensure that at this point the subscribers are removed, what I haven't done is:

1. Work out how to overide the WP Mail function or install a SMTP plugin to enable different things to happen to the emails on the live and developer versions of the site.
2. Work out how to add the signup form to the site (on a regular WP site it is simply a matter of adding the widget to the sidebar using the admin web interface).
3. Work out how to add a /news section to the site for WordPress Posts.

I'd appreciate it if someone else could pick up these three tasks above.

[chriscroome]

Further to my comment yesterday I have sent a test Newsletter from the https://dev.coops.tech/ site to people on the #newsletter Slack channel and this highlighted a further issue with the email footer — If we send plain text email newsletters we will need to amend the footer to:

1. Have a working URL to unsubscribe.
2. Not contain HTML.

[chriscroome]

We can edit the opt-in and un-sub URL's at a database level or using WP-CLI:

wp option list | grep "ig_es_.*link"
ig_es_optinlink https://dev.coops.tech/?es=optin&db={{DBID}}&email={{EMAIL}}&guid={{GUID}}
ig_es_unsublink https://dev.coops.tech/?es=unsubscribe&db={{DBID}}&email={{EMAIL}}&guid={{GUID}}

So I think I have done all I can on this — the outstanding issues need to be addressed by someone who understands the Outlandish Bedrock WordPress structure:

1. Work out what URL's will work for opting in and unsubbing, you can using the admijn interface to sign yourself up and then send yourself a newsletter, or ask @chrisc in #newsletter on Slack to do this for you so you have something to work from.
2. Work out how to add the signup form the Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin generates to display on the front page.

Note that 1. and 2. above are dead simply to sort out on a standard WordPress site.

[chriscroome]

I spent 15 minutes with @harryrobbins looking at this on Friday, but he had to dash out to a meeting and didn't have time to solve the two things I'm stuck on above, however he does now know what the issues are and is confident that it can be solved.

[sdgluck]

@chriscroome 1 and 2 done on #91. Needs #90 merged first though. Dunno if this ticket can be closed once they're merged?

Edit: as a side note you can see in #91 that it wasn't that much work- just required a little bit of knowledge of the OOWP system we use at Outlandish. (We are always happy to answer questions on this and Bedrock, of course.)

[decentral1se]

We ended up just going with discourse posts in the end. Thanks for all the work on this people 💯! I think we could close this one off by adding a place to list all the links to the discourse posts of the newsletter (which are curated and have some content there, so it is kinda like a blog). We could also get a twitter embed of the cotech account. I'll have a poke around.