Happy April! Our first release of the month includes some improvements to ESP syncing, Mailchimp default statuses, and ad unit organization, not to mention a number of smaller bugfixes.

Choose which Reader Activation meta fields to sync to your email service provider

This release adds a new control that allows you to choose whether contact data is synced to the connected email service provider (ESP), and which metadata fields should be synced.

All the metadata fields will be synced by default (which matches how this worked before this feature was added), but you can change the options under Newspack > Engagement > Reader Activation > Advanced Settings.

Change the default status of readers in Mailchimp

You can now change the default status of readers who sign up and are synced to Mailchimp. Originally, the Newspack plugin would give them the ‘transactional’ status, which to Mailchimp means that they are registered, but haven’t opted in to any newsletters. This makes it impossible to send these new readers pretty standard emails, like welcome messages.

This option will appear on sites connected to Mailchimp under Newspack > Engagement > Reader Activation > Advanced Settings, and will only appear once you select an Audience ID to sync to. The default setting will be ‘Transactional/Non-subscribed’, and it can be changed to ‘Subscribed’.

Include the unit ID in the ads unit labels

This release adds the ad unit ID to the placement settings ad unit dropdown, to make it easier to identify different units.

These IDs will be visible when you navigate to Newspack > Advertising > Placements, and edit an individual placement.

Other bugfixes and tweaks

• Categories and tags marked as sponsored with the Newspack Sponsors plugin will now correctly display the sponsor’s information on those archive pages. This is how this plugin originally handled archives, and the change in behavior was not intentional.
• We’ve made some improvements to the reader activation one-time password screen, so the inputs properly clear if a reader opts to use a different way to login.
• The + symbol is allowed in reader emails again. This allows using a Gmail feature to create email aliases on the fly, which can be helpful to publishers for testing flows, and useful to readers who use this trick to keep their inbox organized.

Next release cycle

Our next set of releases will be coming out the week of April 22nd! Until then,

– The Newspack Product team