Martin Cleaver, masterfully.

I just spent a few hours this morning installing, configuring and troubleshooting http://subscribe2.wordpress.com/tag/installation/

The idea is that readers can register and get emailed about certain categories of topic I write about, as many people are not yet using an RSS reader. This would especially be a boon to my friends and family back home most of whom missed out on visiting me in Canada at low cost. FeedBurner provides email-subscription, but its an all-or-nothing not per-category affair, and my friends interests are likely not that interesting to potential clients, and vice-versa.

Subscribe2 is a plugin for wordpress, not for wpmu. There are some holes in the user-interface design and not everything works. After the jump I’ll go through some technical details. Its a great idea and I appreciate the effort gone into creating it. I might be tempted to help fix-up or pay someone else to help when the code becomes publicly writable.

In the meantime just know I’m trying to make my site more friendly…

Conceptual Design

First, Subscribe2 seems to make a confusing distinction between people registering as users on your blog and those merely subscribing. Its confusing because Wordpress already has a meaning for the term ’subscriber’ - its a subtype of registered users - but Subscribe2 subscribers are completely separate. Grr. Registered users get to control options about which categories they want email about, whereas subscribers get everything sent to them. So the concept makes sense but the wording needs changing and perhaps this is explained in the documentation somewhere, but its certainly not mentioned on the screens in the interface.

Second, you have to change the code to provide a wordpress page number that contains the s2 sign up page (S2PAGE) code. As I run a wordpress multiuser account this means I can’t install it once and have all users use it, because each would need a page installed, and each page might end up with a different id. Quite unhelpful: the setting should be in the database.

Third, the list of categories that shows available for subscription is a mess. It needs sorting, and preferably by a central facility in Wordpress, not by each plugin.

Bugs

1) There’s a conflict with diggclick, which appears to be rendering the digg icon next to the static page. The instructions point out that I shouldn’t ask for help until I have tried turning off all other plugins and thoroughly searched the forums. I’ve not had the time.

2) According to the code in 2.2.8, logged in users should be able to manage the per-category log-ins via …/wp-admin/profile.php?page=subscribe2/subscribe2.php (Users -> Subscriptions) This just died with:

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare class subscribe2 in …/plugins/subscribe2/subscribe2.php on line 53

Searching people’s responses I found http://wordpress.org/support/topic/75422?replies=4#post-434245 written 4 days ago. None of those suggestions worked but fixing the URL to this did:

wp-admin/users.php?page=subscribe2.php (line 64)

I also applied the basename suggestion for http://wordpress.org/support/topic/75422?replies=4#post-434245 as it looked like the right thing to do.

3) It appears I have to allow readers to create accounts on my wpmu installation. I never previously understood before why a reader would want an account on my blog. Now I do. My problem now is working out how to enable such readership sign-up from the wordpress interface and how to ensure readers get a simple interface that shows them only what they need.

Installing the plugin seems to have broken the sign-up process. As the site is not up for general account creation its something I can live with, for now. WordpressMU does seem like the unwanted stepchild of Wordpress though, and its been more than one occasion that I’ve thought that using Drupal (where everyone is in multiuser mode) would have been less hassle.

4) I have received no email verification messages and no bounces so actually no one can subscribe yet.

Hopefully the blog notifying system will mean me writing this will help the author incorporate the above code change.

These things always take longer than planned

This entry was posted on Friday, December 22nd, 2006 at 1:38 pm and is filed under wordpress widgets, wpmu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.