Plaintext for the Newsletter plugin

The Newsletter Plugin is great for generating HTML newsletters. Its sophisticated Drag & Drop Composer makes it very easy to create a newsletter that looks good and renders well in a variety of email readers.

But it is generally considered good practice to include “plain text” version of the newsletter as well. For that reason, an automatic plaintext generation capability was added to the Newsletter plugin. However, that built-in capability does not apply to Raw HTML newsletters nor does it apply to transactional emails.

The purpose of this add-on is to add a plaintext generation option to all newsletters and emails sent by the Newsletter plugin.

For Raw HTML newsletters, this add-on adds the same “Autogenerate” / “Hand edited” dropdown on the Advanced settings tab that is also present for newsletters created using the Composer.

For transactional emails (such as the Welcome message, the Activation email, the Goodbye email), this add-on adds a global setting. Note that this will overwrite the default text versions generated by the Newsletter plugin for the Welcome message and the Activation email.

The plain text version is generated by code that is now part of the Newsletter plugin. It is created by reading the HTML version of the email and removing the formatting. Images are replaced by their “alt” tag and links are shown in brackets.

For an example, see my blog.

This add-on is compatible with

• WordPress default mailer, if configured
• all Newsletter plugin’s mail delivery integration add-ons (e.g. SMTP, SendGrid, etc)
• the Superfast Mailgun for the Newsletter plugin add-on
• the Mailgun for WordPress plugin when configured to use SMTP
• certain other third-party mail plugins, e.g. WP Mail SMTP and Easy WP SMTP

This add-on is not compatible with mailer plugins that replaces the wp_mail() function (e.g. Mailgun for WordPress configured to use the HTTP API). In that case, a warning will be displayed on the Plaintext options page.

Please provide feedback on the Support forum. Thanks!