Lightweight Newsletter Builder for WordPress

In this post I’d like to share how the Openstream newsletter evolved over the last 8 years and introduce you to a new WordPress plugin that will make your life easier if you want to both publish a newsletter on your WordPress website and send it to a list of subscribers with Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor or Sendinblue.

If you’re using another newsletter tool, you can request an integration. ActiveCampaign, AWeber and Sendy integrations are already underway.

Openstream Newsletter History

We sent our first newsletter with Mailchimp in March 2013 using Mailchimp’s integrated feature to create a newsletter archive listing all issues on our website. In April 2016 we started publishing our newsletter directly on our website as WordPress blog posts, because using Mailchimp’s embedded archive is very comfortable, but because it uses a sub domain like e.g. us4.campaign-archive.com the authors do not get credit for their content on their own domain, which is not ideal from a search engine optimization perspective.

Once the newsletter was published on our website, we would manually copy the content into a Mailchimp campaign and send it to our subscribers. Copying and pasting the content and optimizing the images for Mailchimp usually took us around two hours.

In January 2019 we started publishing our newsletter with the new WordPress Gutenberg editor. Although there are various WordPress newsletter plugins to send WordPress posts as a newsletter, when looking for newsletter plugins that also support the new block editor end of last year, we stumbled upon Newsletter Glue, a WordPress plugin that enables you to send any post or page as a newsletter without manually copying and pasting the content into your newsletter tool.

Since November 2020, Lesley Sim from Singapore and Ahmed Fouad from Egypt released 11 versions of their plugin.

Newsletter Glue Version History

• 1.0.0 – Launch!
• 1.0.1 – License key notification
• 1.0.2 – Double confirmation sending
• 1.0.3 – Strip default CSS
• 1.0.4 – Post embeds
• 1.0.5 – Social embeds and new post embeds UI
• 1.0.6 – More than 1 post embed block
• 1.0.7 – Mailchimp preview text
• 1.0.8 – ActiveCampaign is now integrated!
• 1.0.9 – Post embed properly showing in web-based email preview
• 1.1.0 – GetResponse is now integrated!

According to an announcement on Twitter, the next release of Newsletter Glue will probably ship next week with a cleaner and clearer publishing UI (user interface), because some users (myself included) had issues with saving a newsletter as a draft in Mailchimp.

Although we’re not (yet) a paying customer of Newsletter Glue, I really appreciate the great support from co-founder Lesley. That’s how you do software development in 2021. You listen to your users and then make the software better.

I really like Newsletter Glue, because it saves me around two hours with every newsletter issue. I’m looking forward to new releases and even better integration with the Mailchimp classic and new builder.

Top picture courtesy of Mathyas Kurmann.