Postmatic Plugin – Your Comment Booster

Lately I was playing around with plugins enabling commenters to subscribe to comments. Until I stumbled upon Postmatic and I crush on it. 🙂

What is the purpose of Postmatic plugin?

Before Postmatic I used or tested 3 other “subscribe to comments” type plugins:

• Subscribe to Comments
• Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, and
• Subscribe to DOI Comments.

These are quite popular and they all do a pretty good job. But Postmatic takes visitors engagement to the next level: 100% email based commenting.

Most of the people are spending most of their valuable Internet time with their email. On the other hand, the bloggers would like to see more comments and more subscribers to their blogs.

Well, Postmatic delivers by meeting these two factors. Simple and ingenious.

Many people prefer to communicate using the comfort of their inbox rather than a commenting system of a blog, so this could be an excellent alternative to increase engagement to your blog.

Okay, so let’s see what the Postmatic’s key features are:

Postmatic plugin can basically do two things:

1. enables a commenter to subscribe to the comments of a certain post, and
2. enables any visitor to subscribe to new post notifications, like a newsletter subscription;

The users can submit a comment simply by replying to the email notifications in their familiar email program!

For the time being I only went half way, meaning I’m only using the comment subscription part. For the newsletter part I’m still faithful to AWeber autoresponder. I think it’s better not to split the subscribers between two email marketing services, but maybe it’s only me.

These are the general features of the plugin:

• Displays a checkbox in the comment form allowing the commenter to subscribe to the comments of the current post.
• The visitors can subscribe to new posts notifications through an opt-in form.
• The visitors can post comments simply by replying to those notification emails from their email program.
• Implements an invitation system that turns past commenters into subscribers.
• The basic version delivers the emails using your hosting email infrastructure.

The premium version comes with a ton of new and powerful features, competing with the most popular email marketing autoresponders. Here is a list of these features, according to the plugin’s developer:

• Start building your subscriber list by reaching out to past commenters or using different opt-ins including popups, top bars, sliders, and after-the-post.
• Posts are converted into fully responsive html emails on the fly.
• Email delivery handled through partnerships with Mailchimp and Rackspace.
• Replies are posted as comments in seconds.
• Intelligent comment templates provide conversational context and threaded commenting.
• Comment moderation via email (approve, trash, spam) with a single reply.
• Single-click migration tools for Jetpack, MailPoet, and Mailchimp lists.
• An invitation system that turns past commenters into subscribers.
• Postmatic uses the native commenting and user systems (this is important).

So, Postmatic seems to be a powerful way to convert your visitors into subscribers. I cannot show any proof yet (I just activated it), but the time will prove whether I was right or not when I decided to give it a try.

Related comment plugins

If you want to know where do all these checkboxes come from, here is the full list of comment plugins I’m currently using:

• Postmatic – basically enables email based commenting.
• Epoch by Postmatic – Ajax powered revamp of the commenting system and a great companion to Postmatic plugin.
• AWeber Web Forms – integration of AWeber autoresponder into the comment system.
• CommentLuv – enables commenters to leave a link to one of their latest post below the comment. Apparently, the free version doesn’t always correctly detect the feed address of the commenter’s blog, but the premium plugin seems to have no such issue. Maybe this misbehavior is implemented on purpose, but what do I know. 😉

How to position a checkbox before the submit button

This is off-topic, I admit, but I cannot resist to the temptation to talk about this. I must warn you though, it’s a little bit technical!

Postmatic plugin inserts its checkbox above the submission button using a small JavaScript code snippet, so I was wondering whether I could achieve the same with the AWeber checkbox as well. After a short research I came up with these code snippets:

The JavaScript code (js/my-custom-script.js):

jQuery( function( $ ) {
	// place AWeber checkbox before the comment submission button
	$( '#commentform p:has(#aweber_checkbox)' ).insertBefore($( '#commentform .form-submit' ));
} );

And here is how you can include the JavaScript into your pages with this PHP code that I added in my custom code plugin (read this article for details about custom PHP code):

function my_scripts_action() {
	wp_enqueue_script(
		'my-custom-script',
		plugin_dir_url( __FILE__ ) . 'js/my-custom-script.js',
		array( 'jquery' ), false, true
	);
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'my_scripts_action');

These same code snippets could be used to move around any HTML element. All you have to do is figure out the proper selectors to identify what to move and where to move. The rest is only done with the power of jQuery.

For more information about JQuery please visit this jQuery Guide and Resources page.

If you enjoyed reading this article, please share it to your network so others could read it as well.

Until next time.