CUNY Academic Commons

I've sent him the usual:

I will ask the dev team. First they would like you to read the following and answer these questions:

Request for proprietary/”premium” plugins or themes
We strive to avoid installing plugins that duplicate existing functionality. Please carefully review the list of plugins already available on the Commons (Dashboard > Plugins) before requesting a new one, as it’s likely that your use case is covered by a plugin already installed on the system. We have a strong preference for plugins that are no-cost and provided under a GPL license. These tools align with the free software ethos of the Commons. They also make maintenance easier, since freely licensed tools generally participate in well-understood and accessible development workflows: updates are made available through wordpress.org, authors accept enhancement requests via GitHub or other public platforms, etc. That being said, we understand that commercial tools are sometimes the best option. These tools will be considered only when the requesting user has demonstrated that no viable free option is available. If a non-free plugin is used, we have a strong preference for products whose licenses allow us to offer the product to all sites on the Commons. This is often called an “unlimited” or “developer” license. Users requesting commercial tools are generally responsible for purchasing and maintaining the software license. In cases where the user has purchased the license, please note that the Commons development team is generally not aware of available updates, and does not generally have access to download them. As such, users or organizations that purchase commercial plugins or themes for use on the Commons must demonstrate a commitment to checking for available updates and delivering them to the Commons team no less than every three months. Commercial plugin and theme shops often offer email notifications for available updates; we highly recommend subscribing to these notifications, and immediately passing updates along to the Commons team.
What's the name of the plugin/theme?
In a few words, what does it do?
Please provide a link to the plugin on the WordPress theme repository or (https://wordpress.org/themes/) plugin repository (https://wordpress.org/plugins/)
Please research the release history and popularity of the plugin. How many times has it been downloaded? When was it last updated?
How is the plugin/theme different from what's already provided on the Commons?
Please let us know who you are (include a link to your site) and who will use this tool?

Thanks!

Maybe we should consider hiding MailPoet from sites that don't already have it enabled if we don't want people to use it?

Agreed, but here we have a need that isn't being met. Is is worth giving MailPoet Newsletters Premium once more chance, now that it's updated to version 3? I think I could work productively with Joseph even if it proves to be disappointing.

Hi Marilyn, I'll be curious to hear their answers to the form questions and evaluate their needs. If they don't have anything newsletter-wise in the Commons yet, which seems right if they're coming over from Constant Contact, maybe we just point them to Tinyletter as we did the CPCP in #11878. It's free for 5000 subscribers, which gives them even more leeway than the 1000 they mention for MailPoet. And Tinyletter is all an external service, with just a small plugin for embedding a signup box, which removes our need for maintaining a large plugin that's gone sour in the past.

Maybe we should consider hiding MailPoet from sites that don't already have it enabled if we don't want people to use it?

Yes. We were already hiding the main MailPoet plugin but somehow the "premium" version wasn't covered. I've made the change in https://github.com/cuny-academic-commons/cac/commit/09ed55186cd1d8907d2dcbb33e10e28763b7323e

I do not want to upgrade the plugin. For one thing, I'm unsure that the Commons has a license; wysija-newsletters-premium was installed as part of #2899, and the bill was footed by a separate project. We don't have a budget for purchasing commercial plugins like this.

More importantly, we have experienced extensive problems with several different newsletter plugins. These problems can be attributed in part to the quality of the plugins, and the new version of MailPoet may be an improvement in this sense. But they also have failed because of more structural issues: The Commons's infrastructure is not designed for high-overhead tasks like sending bulk emails.

I agree with Colin that we should offer the alternative recommendation that we've concocted for users needing newsletters.

I agree. Will let Joseph know.