The Postmatic team has announced that version two of its plugin is available for download. This release contains a number of new features including digests, comment intelligence, service integration support, new email templates, and more.
Comment Intelligence
Instead of sending emails for every comment, Comment Intelligence analyzes the comment’s content and sends an email if it matches a high level of relevance to the article. This prevents comments such as +1 or Nice Post from generating emails to subscribers. In order to take advantage of this feature, users need to install and activate the Elevated Comments plugin.
Elevated Comments can also display the best comment within the article as a pull quote. Some of the metrics used to analyze comments are:
- Readability
- Relevance to the post
- Number of words
- Reading level
To learn more on how this particular feature works, visit the Elevated Comments home page.
Email Digests
Digests are a great way to keep subscribers updated, especially on sites that publish multiple times per day. In Postmatic 2, users can configure their layout using five different templates and choose when to send them. Below is an example of what a digest of the Tavern looks like using the modern template.
Integration Support for Zapier
Postmatic 2 supports OptinMonster out-of-the-box and can be integrated with Zapier using webhooks. Zapier is a collection of more than 500 application and service APIs. This enables site owners to trigger events with a service or application based on subscribe and unsubscribe actions.
The Postmatic Journey So Far
Postmatic has come a long way since its launch in 2015. Jason Lemieux, founder of Postmatic, explains the original idea behind the service.
We launched Postmatic a year ago with the idea that if we push content to users and make it as easy as possible for them to engage with it, that they would. People love to talk. They love to share ideas. But we’re all on the go all the time. If the users don’t come to WordPress, we figured we’d get WordPress to the users. That happens via the most widely-used open communication standard on the internet: email. Everyone has it, and nobody owns it. And it worked.
The service continues to grow as more than 170K active users are sending and receiving comments through its system. One of the areas Lemieux and his team are focused on is scaling, “Now we are scaling the product to be a fit for sites with upwards of 1,000 comments per post and 30 or so posts per day,” Lemieux said.
“The servers will take care of the traffic. Machine learning is handling processing the comments to decide what is worth sending, what is not, and how to send no more than 3 emails per day per user.” In a guest post published on iThemes.com, Lemieux goes into detail on re-imagining conversations in WordPress.
Users can check out Postmatic 2 and try out its new features by downloading it from the plugin directory. To learn more about the company and the people behind it, listen to episode 207 of WordPress Weekly. Are you using Postmatic on your site? If so, tell us about your experience in the comments.
Postmatic is getting more awesome and had taken the “subscribe to comments” thing to another level. Now I’m seriously starting to consider it as a must use plugin. Can we hope for a Slack integration anytime soon?